{"id":153,"date":"2008-05-27T11:17:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-27T15:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/clients.chrisvanpatten.com\/theatreaficionado.com\/2008\/05\/memorial-day-at-south-pacific.html"},"modified":"2008-05-27T11:17:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-27T15:17:00","slug":"memorial-day-at-south-pacific","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"Memorial Day at ‘South Pacific’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frank Rich commented in an op-ed about the current revival of South Pacific <\/em>and hits the nail on the head about the sort of impact this revival is having on audiences. Many of the feelings described are those I felt when watching this superlative production. I knew it was a hit, but I’m stunned at just how big a hit it is! Can you imagine? $1,000 in cash for a ticket? My word.<\/p>\n

From the NY Times (in case you missed it):
<\/strong>
Op-Ed Columnist
<\/strong>Memorial Day at \u2018South Pacific\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

By FRANK RICH<\/a>
NEW YORK is a ghost town on Memorial Day weekend. But two distinct groups are hanging tight: sailors delighting in the timeless shore-leave rituals of Fleet Week<\/a>, and theatergoers clutching nearly impossible-to-get tickets for \u201cSouth Pacific.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of those sailors served in a war that has now lasted longer than American involvement in World War II but is largely out of sight and mind as civilians panic about gas prices at home. \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d has its sailors too: this 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical tells of those who served in what we now call \u201cthe good war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Lincoln Center<\/a> revival<\/a> of this old chestnut<\/a> is surely the most unexpected cultural sensation the city has experienced in a while. In 2008, when 80-plus percent of Americans believe their country is in a ditch, there wouldn\u2019t seem to be a big market for a show whose heroine, the Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, is a self-described \u201ccockeyed optimist\u201d who sings of being \u201cas corny as Kansas in August.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet last week one man stood outside the theater with a stack of $100 bills offering $1,000 for a $120 ticket. Inside, audiences start to tear up as soon as they hear the overture, even before they meet the men and women stationed in the remote islands of the New Hebrides. Among those who\u2019ve been enraptured by this \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d the most common refrain is, \u201cI couldn\u2019t stop myself \u2014 I was sobbing.\u201d<\/p>\n

This would include me, and I have been trying to figure out why ever since I first saw this production in March. It certainly wasn\u2019t nostalgia. I was born two months before the show\u2019s Broadway premiere in April 1949 and had never before seen \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d on stage. It was mainly a musty parental inheritance from my boomer childhood. My father had served in the Pacific theater for 26 months, and my mother replayed the hit show tunes incessantly on 78s as our new postwar family settled into the suburbs.<\/p>\n

Like countless others, I did see Hollywood\u2019s glossy 1958 film version<\/a>. As the British World War II historian Max Hastings writes in \u201cRetribution,\u201d his unsparing new book about the war\u2019s grisly endgame in the Pacific, \u201cMany of us gained our first, wonderfully romantic notion of the war against Japan by watching the movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein\u2019s \u2018South Pacific.\u2019 \u201d But the movie of \u201cSouth Pacific,\u201d a candy-colored idyll dominated by wide-screen tourist vistas, is not the show. Its lush extravagance evokes the 1950s boom more than war.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, after the movie had come and gone, Vietnam pushed \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d into a cultural black hole. No one wanted to see a musical about war unless it was \u201cHair.\u201d Unlike its Rodgers and Hammerstein siblings \u201cOklahoma!\u201d and \u201cThe Sound of Music,\u201d it never received a full Broadway revival.<\/p>\n

Today everyone thinks they\u2019ve seen the genuine \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d only because its songs reside in the collective American unconscious. \u201cSome Enchanted Evening.\u201d \u201cYounger Than Springtime.\u201d \u201cThere Is Nothin\u2019 Like a Dame.\u201d But few Americans born after V-J Day did see the real thing, which is one reason why audiences are ambushed by the revival. They expect corn, but in a year when war and race are at center stage in the national conversation, this relic turns out to have a great deal to say.<\/p>\n

Though it contains a romance, \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d is not at all romantic about war. The troops are variously bored, randy, juvenile and conniving. They are not prone to jingoistic posturing. When American officers try to recruit Emile de Becque, a worldly French expatriate, in a dangerous reconnaissance operation, they tell him he must do so because \u201cwe\u2019re against the Japs.\u201d De Becque, who is the show\u2019s hero, snaps at them: \u201cI know what you\u2019re against. What are you for?\u201d No one bothers to answer his question. The men have been given a job to do, and they do it.
\u201cSouth Pacific\u201d isn\u2019t pro-war or antiwar. But it makes you think about the costs. When, after months of often slovenly idling, the troops ship out for the action they\u2019ve been craving, the azure tropical sky darkens to a gunpowder gray. Their likely mission<\/a> is to storm the beach at Tarawa, where in November 1943 more than 1,000 Americans and 4,600 Japanese would die in less than 76 hours in one of the war\u2019s deadliest battles.<\/p>\n

This is a more fatalistic World War II than some we\u2019ve seen lately. When America was sleepwalking on the eve of 9\/11, the good war was repositioned as an uplifting brand. Nostalgia kicked in. Perhaps we wanted to glom onto an earlier America\u2019s noble mission because we, unlike \u201cthe greatest generation,\u201d had none of our own. The real \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d returns us to the war as its contemporaries saw it, when the wounds were too raw to be healed by sentiment.
That reflects the show\u2019s provenance. It was hot off the press: a nearly instantaneous adaptation of \u201cTales of the South Pacific,\u201d the 1947 novel in which the previously unknown James A. Michener set down his own wartime experiences in the Pacific.<\/p>\n

Many theatergoers who saw \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d in 1949 had sons and brothers who had not returned home. Just 10 days after it opened at the Majestic Theater on 44th Street, The New York Times carried a small story<\/a> datelined Honolulu. A ship had arrived there bearing \u201cthe bodies of 120 American war dead,\u201d the remains of men missing in action since 1943. \u201cThus ended the last general search for the men who fell in the South Pacific war,\u201d the article said.
Watching \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d now, we\u2019re forced to contemplate Iraq, which we\u2019re otherwise pretty skilled at avoiding. Most of us don\u2019t have family over there. Most of us long ago decided the war was a mistake and tuned out. Most of us have stopped listening to the president who ginned it up. This month, in case you missed it, he told an interviewer that he had made the ultimate sacrifice<\/a> of giving up golf for the war\u2019s duration because \u201cI don\u2019t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSouth Pacific\u201d reminds us that those whose memory we honor tomorrow \u2014 including those who served in Vietnam \u2014 are always at the mercy of the leaders who send them into battle. It increases our admiration for the selflessness of Americans fighting in Iraq. They, unlike their counterparts in World War II, do their duty despite answering to a commander in chief who has been both reckless and narcissistic. You can\u2019t watch \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d without meditating on their sacrifices for this blunderer, whose wife last year claimed<\/a> that \u201cno one suffers more\u201d over Iraq than she and her husband do.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s racial conflicts are also startlingly alive. Nellie Forbush, far from her hometown of Little Rock, recoils from de Becque when she learns that he fathered two children by a Polynesian woman. In the original script, Nellie denigrates de Becque\u2019s late wife as \u201ccolored.\u201d (Michener gave Nellie a more incendiary word in his book.) \u201cColored\u201d was cut in rehearsals then but has been restored now, and it lands like a brick in the theater. It\u2019s not only upsetting in itself. It\u2019s upsetting because Nellie isn\u2019t some cracker stereotype \u2014 she\u2019s lovable (especially as embodied by the actress Kelli O\u2019Hara). But how can we love a racist? And how can she not love Emile\u2019s young mixed-race children?<\/p>\n

Michener would work out this story in his own life<\/a>. In 1949, he moved to Hawaii, where he would eventually make a third, long-lived marriage with a Japanese-American who had been held in an internment camp during the war. \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d works through this American dilemma for the audience, too. Years before Little Rock\u2019s 1957 racial explosion, Nellie moves beyond her prejudices, propelled by life and love and the circumstances of war. She charts a path that much of America, North and South, would haltingly begin to follow. (In the script, we also hear of racism in Philadelphia\u2019s Main Line.) \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d opened as President Truman was implementing the desegregation of America\u2019s armed forces \u2014 against the backdrop<\/a> of Ku Klux Klan beatings of black veterans.<\/p>\n

Then and now, the show concludes with the most classic of American tableaus: Emile, Nellie and the two kids sitting down to a family meal. It\u2019s hard for us to imagine how this coda must have struck audiences in 1949, when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states (as it would be in 16 until 1967). But nearly 60 years later, this multiracial family portrait has another context. The audiences watching \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d in this intense election year are being asked daily to take stock of just how far along we are on Nellie\u2019s path and how much further we still have to go.<\/p>\n

And so as we watch that family gather at the end of \u201cSouth Pacific,\u201d both their future and their country\u2019s destiny yet to be written, we weep for the same reason we often do when we experience a catharsis at the theater. We grieve deeply for our losses and our failings, even as we feel an undertow of cockeyed optimism about the possibilities of healing and redemption that may yet lie ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frank Rich commented in an op-ed about the current revival of South Pacific and hits the nail on the head about the sort of impact this revival is having on audiences. Many of the feelings described are those I felt when watching this superlative production. I knew it was a hit, but I’m stunned at … Continue reading Memorial Day at ‘South Pacific’<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1807,1671,1666],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-frank-rich","tag-lct","tag-south-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theatreaficionado.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}