by Peter Marks
April 4, 2008
view feature on washingtonpost.com
South Pacific
Vivian Beaumont Theater
Lincoln Center Theater presents the iconic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which is returning to the New York scene in its first-ever Broadway revival.
Show Dates:
Performances from 01 Mar 2008
Opening 03 Apr 2008
Closing 22 Jun 2008
Performance Schedule:
Tuesday – Saturday @8pm
Wednesday and Saturday @2pm
Sunday @3pm
Beginning April 7: Tuesday @7pm
Tickets:
Pricing: $66.50 – $111.50
Box Office: Tele-charge: (212) 239-6200
Group Sales info: Group Sales: Caryl Goldsmith, 212-889-4300
Show Run Time:
TBA
Theatre Information:
Vivian Beaumont Theater
150 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023
US
Public Transportation/Parking:
SUBWAY: Take 1,9 to 66th Street and walk South to Lincoln Center and the theatre.
Synopsis:
South Pacific concerns the lives of U.S. military men, nurses and the residents of the Polynesian island they occupy during World War II. Nurse Nellie Forbush is “In Love With a Wonderful Guy,” a French planter with small children. Clean-cut Lt. Cable has fallen hard for Bloody Mary’s daughter Liat. And the seabees, sailors and marines will tell you that there is “Nothing Like a Dame.” The show’s gorgeous score also includes “Cockeyed Optimist,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Younger Than Springtime,” “Honey Bun” and “This Nearly Was Mine.”
Show Advisory:
None
Genre:
Musical
Cast List:
Kelli O’Hara
Paulo Szot
Loretta Ables Sayre
Matthew Morrison
Danny Burstein
Sean Cullen
Victor Hawks
Luka Kain
Li Jun Li
Laurissa Romain
Thomas G. Waites
Noah Weisberg
Becca Ayers
Wendi Bergamini
Genson Blimline
Grady McLeod Bowman
Charlie Brady
Matt Caplan
Christian Carter
Helmar Augustus Cooper
Jeremy Davis
Margot de la Barrev Christian Delcroix
Laura Marie Duncan
Mike Evariste
Laura Griffith
Lisa Howard
Maryann Hu
Zachary James
Robert Lenzi
Garrett Long
Nick Mayo
George Merrick
William Michals
Kimber Monroe
Emily Morales
Darius Nichols
George Psomas
Andrew Samonsky
Jerold E. Solomon
Pr
Sometimes, theaters have greatness thrust upon them. At the moment, that is the glorious condition in which one finds the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, where an intoxicating new “South Pacific” is staking a claim as the best revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein in a generation.
Director Bartlett Sher, who shepherded the eye-pleasing “Light in the Piazza” to the stage, is your artistic guide for the evening, and given what he has elicited from his actors and designers, he should be given the keys to the whole darn R&H estate. From a bravura opening orchestral salvo to a final, downy dramatic flourish, his production is as close to ideal as a fan of the classic-style American musical is likely to encounter.
The show Sher has assembled is a tribute not only to the pure musical gifts of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II — there’s not one bad melodic egg in the whole marvelous carton — but also to the talents of Lincoln Center Theater’s human-resources people. (Is there time to add a Tony Award for best casting director?)
Kelli O’Hara, smashing in the Harry Connick Jr. “Pajama Game” of a couple of years back, plays the pivotal role of Ensign Nellie Forbush, the sheltered nurse from Little Rock who falls for a Frenchman in the South Seas with a complicated past she can’t handle. As Nellie must keep us on her side even as she evinces some distasteful biases — she cannot accept her lover’s mixed-race children — it’s the kind of lesson-learning part that must navigate a sympathetic route between party pooper and Pollyanna.
O’Hara’s vulnerable Southern belle is of a convincing complexion; her Nellie believably seems the type of well-meaning person from a less enlightened era and place who simply had not been raised to think outside the socially conventional. At the same time, the actress never appears so naive as to be a bit of sunny cardboard. Even when she sings a tune of such outdated sensibility as “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” O’Hara manages to convey something in the character like sexy self-awareness.
For the sake of sex, too, she’s been paired here with the evening’s find, the Brazilian operatic baritone Paulo Szot, and what she creates with this virile Emile de Becque is an altogether passionate center for the show. The Emiles of the past have often seemed little more than chiseled features and muscular lungs, but Szot adds to the power a permeable layer of gentleness. In the first act, Szot delivers a suitable, melts-in-his-mouth rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening.” By Act 2 and the point at which an audience is completely in his corner, his silky authority over “This Nearly Was Mine” raises goose bumps.
Around his warm couple, Sher creates a production that stays faithful to the songwriters and to Joshua Logan, who co-wrote the libretto. In this World War II story of restless Americans on a Pacific island Navy base, it is difficult not to sense the modern-day parallels, especially as they concern the coarsening impact an alien military culture might have on a native one. That notion is brought home most pointedly in the role of money-hungry go-between Bloody Mary — played with verve by Loretta Ables Sayre — who’ll sacrifice anything, even a daughter, for a buck.
The daughter, Liat (Li Jun Li), is offered up to Lt. Cable, an officer with a Princeton pedigree and, like Nellie, a prejudice that trumps love. Matthew Morrison proves to be revelatory as Cable, creating for the character a harder exterior than you might anticipate — unlike the island’s Seabees, he’s seen action — and one that only the beautiful young girl might be able to crack. (If anything suffers just a tad, it’s the sometime exaggerated comic efforts of Danny Burstein, as the fortune-hunting Luther Billis.)
The evocation here of the gritty military intrusion on paradise is one of the evening’s triumphs. Designer Michael Yeargan devises what feels like the set of an epic movie, one on which the harsh realities of war and occupation virtually push the natural beauty of the place to the sidelines. Off in the distance, beyond the planes and trucks and detritus of war, we glimpse an ocean and the dunes of the beach, over which sailors and islanders depart for mystical Bali Ha’i, whose twin volcanoes seem to emerge, thanks to lighting designer Donald Holder, magically from the mist.
“South Pacific’s” aural universe is conjured just as majestically. As the overture swells to the notes of “Bali Ha’i,” the roof over the Beaumont’s orchestra pit retracts, revealing the 30 musicians who give a swooning complexity to one of Broadway’s sterling scores. Lincoln Center is proudly showing us what’s under the hood. In this case, you’ll want to applaud every rev of the engine.