[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: July 21, 2008]
Through relentless early summer drizzle, and around the maze of construction in the Lincoln Center forecourt, to the Vivien Beaumont Theater for "approximately three hours" of the higher schmaltz.
A review of this lauded, TONY-winning, smasheroo, which has been playing to packed houses since springtime, would be tardy and superfluous. A success it is; rightly so, and who can balk at such a lavish staging of a classic musical not seen on Broadway for more than fifty years?
The matchless playing of Kelli O'Hara, Paul Szot, and the voice of Hawaii, Loretta Ables Saure, provides metaphorical rose-colored spectacles which - successfully for the most part - obscure the flaws and problems endemic to the show itself. Some reflection, then, is in order.
I confess I am a fan of early Rodgers and Hammerstein - Oklahoma, and above all Carousel. Those shows, through the choreography of Agnes DeMille as well as through Hammerstein's writing and Rodgers' acknowledgement of folk musical traditions, triumphantly completed the project - begun by Showboat - of creating a popular, demotic American musical theater. They cleared the way for Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, et al.
Regrettably, in my view, South Pacific was the beginning of an artistic retrenchment, continued through King and I and The Sound of Music, in which Rodgers returned increasingly to lush, honey-rich romantic forms which would not have been out of place in The Desert Song, or even The Merry Widow; I hasten to add that in full-blown love ballad mode, he has few peers.
While Hammerstein remained capable of writing American-as-she-is-spoken (exhibit: "There is Nothing Like a Dame"), he developed a concurrent taste for cutesy-pie sentimentality of the most shameless order. It's no coincidence that there's a children's chorus of one form or another in each those latter three works (along with a gruff but loving father to conduct it).
Certainly, those massive hit shows (and movies) have songwriting highlights approached by few other Broadway teams, but the common touch of Oklahoma and the deep moral seriousness of Carousel have always made me wonder about the road not taken. In South Pacific, the character of Billy Bigelow would have been re-written as comic relief.
Speaking of moral seriousness, there is little in South Pacific. I am at a disadvantage, I confess, in not having read the James Michener short stories on which the book is based. It may well be the case that the distasteful and sometimes bone-headed plot elements are simply carried over from the original, unchanged. Some will say that race is a morally serious issue, not to mention fascism, and that South Pacific raises both of them. So it does, if only to kick them around in an inarticulate manner and leave the characters attitudes to them unresolved.
Kelli O'Hara, whose voice and energy are beyond criticism, has inadvertently developed a fine specialism in retards - literal and moral. I am still unable to restrain my amusment when I recall that the character she played in Light in the Piazza was a drip because she had been kicked in the head by a horse when young.
As for Redneck Nellie, she must be the most unsympathetic heroine in the history of the American musical theater. She makes Norma Desmond look like a hard-headed realist. Nellie, who we adore as she runs back and forth and up and down the vast, beautiful set singing "I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy", turns out to harbor an unusually profound streak of racism.
Given the mores of a girl from 1940s Arkansas, "immature and incurably green", one might imagine her reluctant to marry a black or asian man. But she breaks off her engagement to De Becque, not because he turns out to be black (shades of Showboat), not because he is French, not even because he is a self-confessed murderer, and certainly not because he was previously married - but because he was previously married to an island girl, presumably of off-white shade.
One wonders if she'd have been less concerned had he simply banged a few of the willing "natives", and not tied the knot, but the subject is not broached. Nellie's not an average mainstream racist - she's an overachiever. And one is left wondering how, precisely, she has grown - if at all - when it takes De Becque's presumed death to shake her convictions.
De Becque himself is an enigma. Politically and morally, he's an isolationist, for dim reasons connected to the not unreasonable wish of the French authorities to arrest him for shooting the town bully back home. One has the impression that his refusal to join the fight against fascism is intended to be a sign of moral integrity, and that when he finally volunteers - only because he has developed a post-Nellie deathwish - his moral stature is only increased. Forgive me if I don't get it.
Nellie's racism is laboriously explained in one of Hammerstein's more ponderous songs ("You Have to be Carefully Taught") by the young lieutenant who himself feels unable to marry the underage local girl he has spent the first act bonking. At least he has the grace to seem uneasy with his conscience. As for the greedy mother's tireless pimping of her daughter to the passing naval officer, it's no more tasteful here than it was in the movie.
"Bali Hai" strikes me, more and more, as truly creepy song.
It's no great complaint that the performances by Szot (as De Becque) and Saure (as the sinister mum) are largely indistinguishable from those of Rossano Brazzi and Juanita Hall, respectively, in the 1958 movie. The characterizations are appropriate, and they sing - Szot especially - with great force and passion. No performer stands much chance acting a character as contradictory as Nellie, but O'Hara may well be the best female stage musical performer of her generation. And I say that as a Melissa Errico fan.
Anyone who has read this far, and is in reach of New York, has doubtless seen the production already. It's certainly not to be missed. But it's also permissible to remove the rose-colored spectacles as the curtain comes down, and analyze why this show, no matter how perfectly staged, will never be perfectly enchanting.
The Lincoln Center page about it is here