In orchestra pit, a show like 'South Pacific' needs some sonic boom

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway classic

South Pacific

opens a short run at the Academy of Music on Tuesday, and the word in show circles is that whatever faith you've lost in this musical - whether in bad summer stock or in the eccentrically shot film version - will be restored.

Not having had much faith in it to begin with, I attended the Lincoln Center Theater production during its New York run with much urban skepticism, but left feeling as corny as Kansas in August.

The veracity of Bartlett Sher's staging, the real-person acting (no Mitzi Gaynor glamour girls here), and the enveloping scenic atmosphere were just captivating. But one of the most powerful underlying factors was the least noticeable - the 30-person orchestra, the size of the 1948 original. The touring version at the Academy of Music Tuesday through next Sunday will be almost as large, with 26 players (22 of them locally contracted).

Though orchestra size has long been an issue - even during the supposed golden age of the 1960s, orchestras were incrementally reduced during long Broadway runs - some shows simply require sonic magnitude, and South Pacific is one. Carousel, whose 1945 original had an orchestra of 40, is another.

But not Oklahoma! Though its film version had something the size of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a production at Washington's Arena Stage now has a cut-down 15-piece orchestra with the hearty approval of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which closely manages and monitors its properties.

Similarly, The Threepenny Opera, recently seen at the Arden Theatre, did just fine with even less. Though the Arden sought special grants to finance last season's Sunday in the Park With George with a full complement of 12 musicians (more than the recent Broadway revival), in what seems like a sound artistic choice Threepenny had only eight, even though its earliest 1930 recordings clearly had rather more.

Obviously, the Brecht-Weill theater piece about London beggars, criminals, and prostitutes is going to take to a reduced orchestra more readily than the genteel plantation dwellers and all-American guys and gals of South Pacific. During Threepenny, my ear even apprehended a sound that theater purists dread - a synthesizer - and I kind of liked it, with most other aspects of the show.

Sound requirements say much about the essence of the story being told onstage. Though the Threepenny synthesizer was a far cry from the antiseptic "killer bees" sound of 1970s synthesizers, you knew the sound was only a representation of something real. That's Brechtian "alienation effect" in a nutshell: The author wanted listeners to step away from plot and characters and consider the social issues at hand.

So many of the Threepenny characters are about subterfuge and warfare that's more psychological than real. One central character is a man who claims public territories of London as zones he controls with a network of beggars - and outlanders are penalized with the threat (rather than the reality) of beatings. So if an accordion is heard in a synthetic approximation, all the better.

In a strange way, Oklahoma! is in a similar boat. That show is about American identity, and like Threepenny, its characters are sociological specimens without dimension. If they showed us their souls, we wouldn't know what to think about them. And thinking, I believe, is what the authors wanted.

In contrast, South Pacific is about going past surfaces, namely skin color. In the larger landscape of World War II, the small-town American girl, Nellie Forbush, rejects the man of her dreams because of her visceral revulsion at his sexual history: His first (now deceased) wife was Polynesian, as are his children. The emotional states underlying layers of racism are what South Pacific is after - and are exactly the element best revealed by music.

The challenge is projecting not easily definable states to audience members who, in 2010, walk in having heard the music for much of their lives. In so many revivals of Broadway shows, mid-performance chats most often break out during the songs - we already know them, so we don't have to worry about missing key plot info. But in South Pacific, you'll miss a lot if you don't reexperience, say, "Some Enchanted Evening" as the expression of a man who is dying of loneliness and has just met his one last chance.

Why might a larger orchestral sound act as insurance that audiences will reexperience that?

Sound has power in itself - apart from the musical constructs that it clothes. Timbres have uncountable ways of reaching one's soul, and the less mediated they are, the more powerful they'll be. That's one explanation of why the South Pacific experience I had in the theater happened, for me, only intermittently in the cast album and the PBS telecast of the production a few months ago. In a world increasingly populated by sophisticated, convenient relay media, from Blu-ray discs to phones that do everything, I'm more aware than ever of the experience that happens only when you're in the room where the sound originates.

As much as music appeals to the mind, sound is often the element that makes the experience elevating. Rarely has that been more apparent to me than at Lincoln Center's White Light Festival on Monday: In a concert titled "Credo," the Latvian National Choir and Wordless Music Orchestra converged on music written by members of the Icelandic indie group Sigur Rós. Some of it was in the "holy minimalist" mode of Arvo Pärt; other pieces were mostly electronic music arranged for live acoustic forces.

If you stepped outside the music and analyzed the harmonic and contrapuntal activity, the pieces would seem so simple as to barely exist. But as a showcase in sound, with so many musicians sometimes concentrating on a single note, the effect could leave you lightheaded, live musicians giving the sound a shimmer and definition not heard in the electronic versions on their albums.

Any piece is going to be a combination of music and sound in endlessly varied proportions; the "Credo" concert was weighted heavily toward the latter. And that was just fine, even though the next day I couldn't have told you what, specifically, I heard. Perhaps music contains the art and sound supplies the experience?