April 24, 2006
South Pacific Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST At a college seminar a couple of decades ago, a naive student asked the author James Michener what the secret of becoming a successful writer was. “Oh, that’s easy,” Michener replied. “Just have Rodgers and Hammerstein make a musical out of your first book.”
The Michener estate, it is safe to assume, is still receiving tidy royalty checks covering his share of South Pacific, which was based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Tales of the South Pacific.
The show was the biggest Broadway hit of its day, perhaps ever. It did not run as long as Oklahoma! (1,925 performances to 2,212), but the reason for that is that Oklahoma! was a very inexpensive show and could make money with the house half empty on weeknights, which it did for two years. South Pacific, with a very large cast and a great many stage hands to handle the complicated sets, could not. It sold out virtually every performance for four years but closed fairly quickly when business finally began to slacken.
But those four sold-out years are legendary. There was a New Yorker cartoon showing people on a New York street. Half of them are bent over, merely schlumping along through life; the other half are striding briskly, their shoulders back, smiles on their faces. Connecting the latter group is a balloon with a tropical island. They’ve seen South Pacific and all’s right with the world. A joke made the rounds where a man seeing the show at a matinee finds himself next to an empty seat. Overcome with curiosity, at the intermission he asks the woman on the other side of the seat if she knows why it’s empty. “It was for my husband,” she replies, “but he died.” The man expresses his sorrow but wonders if a friend couldn’t have come with her. “They’re all at the funeral,” she explains. On its last performance, after all the curtain calls were over, the audience began to file up the aisles, and the actors went to their dressing rooms, the house curtain was left up. Symbolically, at least, South Pacific never really closed at all. But South Pacific has not fared as well in recent decades as the other R&H classics. Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The King and I have all had full-scale revivals in New York and London in the last 15 years that have done much to establish them as the enduring masterpieces of musical theater that they are. South Pacific, however, has not been revived in New York in nearly 40 years, and its recent London revival was less than wholly successful. There are, to be sure, technical reasons for this. South Pacific is a “star vehicle,” a play that requires a star—an actor who, in some indefinable but unmistakable way, lights up a stage by his or her mere presence—to really work. Mary Martin, the original Nellie Forbush, was a star. But actually it is a double star vehicle. And the male lead is very, very difficult to cast. He must be (1) middle-aged, (2) very sexy, and (3) able to command “Some Enchanted Evening,” which is not a song for the musically limited. Ezio Pinzas do not grow on trees. A recent and misbegotten television version starred Glenn Close, who, while certainly a star, is 30 years too old for the part of Ensign Nellie Forbush (one critic dismissed her as “Admiral Forbush”). On Wednesday night on PBS (check your local listings), you’ll have a chance to see South Pacific in a concert version (no sets, limited costumes, limited business) staged at Carnegie Hall last year. It stars Reba McEntire, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and, of all people, Alec Baldwin, playing the comic part of Luther Billis. The audience adored it, and so, for the most part, did the critics. Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that “those fortunate enough to attend this one-night-only benefit for Carnegie Hall had the privilege of experiencing the emotional force of South Pacific . . . as the members of its opening night audience must have in 1949.” Jay Nordlinger of the New York Sun noted that “there are two groups of people who appreciate South Pacific . . . : the masses, and the musicians—meaning the real musicians. They know the material’s worth. The middlebrow people—those with a little education, who know enough for dilettantism—can scoff at South Pacific, or condescend to it. If they had any sense, they’d give a limb or two to have written the least of the songs.” I know I’ll be watching.
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