Enchanted by old 'South Pacific'

People have been stopping me on the street, pointing, calling my name, and ordering me to go to the new Lincoln Center production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's

South Pacific

. Productions pop up every few years in any major city, though this one is the first true Broadway revival and has been heaped with rave reviews. Nonetheless, the core audience has to be told to go in no uncertain terms: To have once loved

South Pacific

is to have been disappointed by it over the years.

My initial reaction was resistance:

"

Again

?"

"Last time I saw the movie, it was unwatchable."

"I'll go

only

if they cut 'Happy Talk.' "

For audiences of a certain age,

South Pacific

was often the first musical to invade one's consciousness, with its tropical setting and World War II life-and-death stakes. But it was also among the first musicals I dismissed, especially in the 1960s when the idea of a popular war was unthinkable.

South Pacific

even became an object of defiant ridicule: I remember one high school talent show with classmates dressed up like hippies and singing, "I'm in Love With a Wonderful High."

But like everybody else who has seen the Lincoln Center production, I am now one of the

South Pacific

pod people. (As Brooke Adams said in

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

, "They were right. It's painless. It's

good

.")

The surprise is that I came out not humming the songs, but thinking about the characters - so much that, a week or two later, the newly released cast album on Sony was a letdown. Though it contained performances by Kelli O'Hara, Paulo Szot, and Loretta Ables Sayre that were exactly as I remembered them, the seductive aura had vanished.

I heard all the strategic tricks the cast used to put the show across - instead of what the tricks were meant to convey. Such dramatic reversals of perception aren't supposed to happen with classics. By definition, isn't there some baseline of quality that allows them to weather momentary impressions?

The answer lies in context. Even though "Some Enchanted Evening" has nearly achieved folk-song status, its meaning goes far deeper when the character it's written for - a middle-aged widower who has finally found someone he can love, but in extremely fraught times - is standing right in front of you. "Younger Than Springtime" no longer seems dated and flowery when it's an outpouring from a previously buttoned-up, Princeton-educated guy from the Main Line. Even "Happy Talk" has an extra charge in Act II, when it represents calm before the disaster.

In any production of

South Pacific

, the stronger the acting, the better the music seems. That conclusion has an obvious logic when you consider the reforms in Broadway musicals that the show represents: Plot and characters dictate song content, in contrast to earlier times when tunes came first, lyrics and dialogue last. However, the magnitude of the impact acting has on the music is unexpected, if only because

South Pacific

maintains so many conventions later swept away by the Sondheim generation, like song reprises that are more like advertisements for sheet-music sales than explorations of character.

It's true that the 1958 film version had credible actors - but it had them in an era when movie-musical soundtracks were recorded in over-orchestrated form. The resulting albums may have been more marketably deluxe that way, but how could

South Pacific

's dialogue scenes affect the music when the realistic, on-location settings were engulfed by a huge orchestra coming out of nowhere?

The more modest Lincoln Center orchestrations (the 1949 Robert Russell Bennett originals) are less imposing. They insinuate themselves more organically into the show's evocation of South Sea islands, which is bound to be more poetic than realistic (it's theater, after all) and, in this case, capture the rhapsodic quality of James Michener's prose, which inspired the creation of

South Pacific

.

Even more interesting in this era of "revisicals," hardly a word or note of

South Pacific

has been changed. Though the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization has no firm policies on alterations (it once authorized a

South Pacific

set in a mental institution), major revivals tend to involve directors sympathetic to the shows as they stand. But Lincoln Center's Bartlett Sher went one better: He studied the 1949 first-day-of-rehearsal script. The song "My Girl Back Home," cut from the 1949 original but included in the 1958 film, was restored for Lincoln Center. More daring, considering the show's dated racial politics, Sher restored Nellie Forbush's reference to Emile de Becque's first wife as "colored."

A few dialogue bits were snipped and, thanks to the swift, modern scene changes, the show's run time is nearly identical to that of the three-hour original. That's not necessarily good news to those used to the more modern 90-minute shows. And I admit to experiencing some restlessness, especially during song reprises, not all of which were cleverly integrated into the show's ecosystem.

Later, though, I realized that much of the show's cumulative impact came from simply spending time in the same room with these characters. Sure,

South Pacific

could be more dramatically efficient. But what intangible qualities might be lost, leaving audiences vaguely unsatisfied?

No one element of

South Pacific

, whether dramatic or musical, truly stands on its own. That means the show is more vulnerable than one might think to quickly assembled productions, or, worse, to the plodding formality of many opera houses. That's also why the new cast album, even though it's well done and preserves the best-remembered aspect of the show, doesn't rise above souvenir status: It's like a photo of the

Mona Lisa

that shows only the smile.

The big picture in the Lincoln Center

South Pacific

delivers all the needed musical and dramatic data with a clarity that allows performers to create a fully fledged dialogue with the audience. And such experiences are too absorbing to ever be redundant.