Review of reviews: Stage

South Pacific

Vivian Beaumont Theater

New York

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****

Nearly six decades after South Pacific bowled over Broadway on its way to nine Tonys and a Pulitzer, it’s finally back where it started, said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Bartlett Sher’s masterful revival of this Rodgers and Hammerstein classic proves that while “everything old can’t be new again, the past certainly can be elegantly reintroduced.” While the duo’s other musicals—especially Oklahoma!—are routinely revived, Broadway has been apprehensive about reviving South Pacific. The racial intolerance underlying the main love story could seem outdated, and the language in Oscar Hammerstein’s book tends to sound funny to today’s politically correct ears. Rather than paper over these tendencies, Sher has wisely chosen a straightforward interpretation that “majestically serves up all that we adore most” about the work.

What could have easily felt like a museum piece instead pulses with vitality, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, the wide-eyed naïf from Arkansas, falls for the charismatic French plantation owner Emile de Becque. But the benighted Nellie can’t quite cope with the fact that the two Polynesian children scampering at Emile’s feet are his flesh and blood. It would be easy to treat this attitude with a heavy dose of “we-know-better-now irony,” but Sher moves forward without condescension. He directs our attention to what’s often overlooked in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals—“the fire of daily life, with all its crosscurrents and ambiguities.”

This may be “the best revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein in a generation,” said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. A 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Tony winner Ted Sperling, reminds us that this score is one of the pair’s best. Songs such as “A Wonderful Guy,” “There’s Nothing Like a Dame,” and “Some Enchanted Evening” testify to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s unparalleled musical gifts. They’re performed with precision by Kelli O’Hara, who keeps the audience on Nellie’s side despite the character’s “untasteful biases,” and the sublime Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot. This South Pacific is “as close to ideal as a fan of the classic-style American musical is likely to encounter.”