South Pacific Broadway Reviews

Above all, though, what impresses about this “South Pacific” is how deeply, fallibly and poignantly human every character seems. Nearly 60 years ago Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, described the show as “a tenderly beautiful idyll of genuine people inexplicably tossed together in a strange corner of the world.” I think a lot of us had forgotten that’s what “South Pacific” is really about. In making the past feel unconditionally present, this production restores a glorious gallery of genuine people who were only waiting to be resurrected.

Before Bartlett Sher's staging of 'South Pacific' gets under way, an excerpt splashed across a front scrim from James A. Michener's source stories characterizes the writer's time stationed in the region during WWII: 'The waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.' It's been almost six decades between the 1949 opening of the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic and the show's first Broadway revival, but the Lincoln Center Theater production sure makes the waiting worthwhile. From the seductive swell of a full orchestra playing the glorious five-minute overture through the poignant final tableau of love and reconciliation, this is ravishing theater.

The manner in which music and the original James Michener stories unfurl throughout in a mix of comedy, romance and a touch of tragedy is theatrical magic of the most beguiling kind. Sher has been helped here by Christopher Gatelli's boisterous but unobtrusive choreography, Michael Yeargan's beautiful settings (at the start, the thrust stage rolls back to expose the full and eloquent orchestra) and Catherine Zuber's carefully accurate costumes. Where Sher and Yeargan have been especially effective is in their sense of period, and, more important, a period filtered through the perspective of history. (Interestingly, although the races are carefully kept apart, the show updates the integration of the US Navy by a couple of decades.) This 'South Pacific' is not a faded photograph, but a modern etching.

What makes this impeccably acted and designed production so extraordinary is Bartlett Sher's meticulous and dramatic direction. The physical production is created on a grand scale. The stage of the Vivian Beaumont boasts not only a breathtaking Pacific panorama, but at times a huge spinning flatbed truck, a flashy war-room, even a World War II fighter plane. Against that Cinemascopic grandeur, performances are on a human scale. The show is filled with fantastic and familiar songs that are presented here like musical conversation, making them sound fresh and exciting. Characters are played with such intimacy you practically hear hearts flutter as people fall in love.

The new -- and first! -- Broadway revival of ``South Pacific,' by Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, pays homage to the original production in all the right ways. It should easily play for at least 1,925 performances -- the length of the original Broadway run.

What makes this Lincoln Center Theater revival of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II classic enormously satisfying is the extraordinary care given to the score of what is the most hit-filled show in the R&H canon. And that's going some since the competition also includes 'Carousel,' 'The King and I' and 'Oklahoma!' The fidelity starts even before the production begins as the Beaumont floor rolls back to reveal an orchestra of 30 musicians (a staggering number in these days of pit penny-pinching) and the first notes of 'Bali Ha'i' jump-start the overture. Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations have never sounded so good. Immediately, the audience is in the right frame of mind to embrace the story - twin romances set against the backdrop of the Second World War. Not only romance, but racism and a sense of duty in the face of fighting - and dying - for your country permeate the tale, based on a James A. Michener novel. They are big themes, most of which are still with us today, that theatregoers in 1949 saw as current events.

The beauty that Rodgers and Bennett provide musically is matched visually by set designer Michael Yeargan, who utilizes the Vivian Beaumont Theatre's thrust stage to create a vast beachscape that peaks at an upstage sand dune, and Donald Holder, who sumptuously lights evening scenes and romantic interludes. And what Bartlett Sher's production does so well is contrast the beauty of the locale with the ugliness displayed by some who occupied those innocent shores during World War II.

But the show’s defining impact was not financial; it was subliminal. At the zenith of America’s postwar power—with abundance and intolerance at loggerheads within the nation—the ravishing score reminded America of its best self, and gave the fraught fifties a mantra of promise. “If you don’t have a dream, / How you gonna have a dream come true?” it asked. Under the elegant, astute direction of Bartlett Sher, Lincoln Center’s revival—the first on Broadway since the show’s début—is a majestic spectacle. Conjured by Michael Yeargan’s superb sets and Donald Holder’s evocative lighting, the romantic and rollicking nineteen-forties world comes to life. But there is nothing retro about the show’s debate. Now, as then, the nation is stuck on issues of race, war, and, as the musical puts it, a “thing called hope.”

Much has been written recently, and rightfully, about how artists influenced by contemporary pop culture have reinvigorated musical theater. But let's pause for a moment to recognize the pre-modern giants: the composers, lyricists and librettists who gave us shows in which guys and dolls fall in love and break into glorious song and dance — not to be ironic or sensational, but simply because that's where their stories and emotions carry them. Those stories can pack more complexity and resonance than they get credit for, as we're reminded by Lincoln Center Theater's gorgeous revival of South Pacific, which opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre.

Lincoln Center Theater's revival of South Pacific is the high point of the spring season—exactly the passionate and bittersweet musical romance that I hoped it would be. Its story of American nurses, marines, and seabees becoming irrevocably changed by their time on an island in the South Pacific during World War II is deeply involving; the people we meet on this island—creations of James Michener by way of librettists Joshua Logan and Oscar Hammerstein II—are intensely human and we come to care about them very much. The craft of its story-telling—Logan and Hammerstein's book, Hammerstein's lyrics, and Richard Rodgers's score—is extraordinary. With director Bartlett Sher at the helm, South Pacific has been lovingly and beautifully realized on the stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, with Ted Sperling's 30-piece orchestra invaluably performing Robert Russell Bennett's original lush orchestrations.

Lincoln Center Theater's revival of South Pacific, directed by Bartlett Sher, plumps for the work's seriousness, approaching it with quiet realism—almost cautiously, as if its romance might prove too fragile for our cynical time. But South Pacific has solidly built-in defenses against breakage, including the self-mocking lyrics in which Nellie ridicules her own romanticism. An additional pinch of that showbiz self-mockery wouldn't have hurt Sher's production, which at times seems too sedate.

Fittingly, it's the music that is the most prominent aspect of the production, as evidenced by the starring role of the large orchestra. At the beginning of the evening, it receives a huge ovation, before the stage slowly extends over the musicians to bring the performers closer to the audience. Directed by Bartlett Sher, this lavish production doesn't always succeed on a purely dramatic level, with the story line involving the major characters never quite connecting the way it should. But it does do full justice to the glorious score, and that's more than enough.

But is South Pacific a masterpiece? The score is a treasure, certainly, but elements of this 1949 show’s depiction of military life now seem corny, as does the pedantic antiracism song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” And although the strings beneath their dialogue signify romance from the start, there is something creepy about the rushed central relationship between American nurse Nellie Forbush (the lovely O’Hara, totally capable as always but a touch on the chilly side) and the wealthy, older French plantation owner Emile de Becque, who is looking for “someone young and smiling.”

But period flavor cuts both ways. Despite the best efforts of Danny Burstein, who got dependable laughs in The Drowsy Chaperone, the antics of fast-talking operator Luther Billis aren’t very funny. And despite O’Hara’s best efforts, the show’s vaunted wrestling match with bigotry doesn’t resonate either. There’s no denying the show’s boldness for 1949, the new seriousness it brought to musical drama on Broadway. Alas, a pioneer spirit doesn’t make the show complex or challenging enough to keep up with the racial conversation we’re having today. If it’s relevant now, it’s largely through letting us see how far our cultural depictions of American race relations have come.