South Pacific

It’s such a strange musical. It has its place in popular memory, thanks to half a dozen unforgettable songs. It is solidly there in musical theatre history, because of its evident attempt to tell a story of depth, political sophistication, and darkness. The soundtrack to the movie was at number one in Britain for 115 weeks, including one unbroken stretch of 70 weeks from November 1958 to March 1960. It’s a good story and the songs are perhaps the richest emotionally that Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote. Certainly I can’t think of anything sadder and more truthful from their catalogue than ‘This Nearly Was Mine’. In America, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, only the second musical to do so.

But it’s very strange, for two reasons. The politics of this musicals are much celebrated but, in truth, they are a bit half-cocked. It’s meant to be a great liberal musical that tries to display and anatomise racism. Lieutenant Cable finds himself drawn sexually to the island woman Liat, but when her mother asks him to marry her, he is repelled; he could never marry her. Similarly, Nellie Forbush has fallen in love with Emile de Becque but when she discovers his mixed-race children she is, despite her sunny nature, disgusted at the thought of being with a man who has slept with a black woman. The play shows both of them having some kind of conversion: Nellie finds that her love for Emile overcomes her prejudice; Cable bitterly articulates the cruelty of racism in the song ‘You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught’.

But neither of these conversions make much sense, narratively or theatrically. We never really discover why Nellie converts; she just does. And it’s not clear that she understands what’s wrong with her prejudice; she just stifles it with love. Her change is very sudden and almost entirely unplotted. I suppose it goes with her character, the cockeyed optimist, but it kind of implies that she lurches unthinkingly from racism to - what? - forgiveness? willed forgetting? Through her story, the play doesn’t so much address racism and brush it under the carpet.

Cable’s song is the high-point of the musical’s articulacy about racism. The song is making the case that racism isn’t natural, it’s drummed into you, by your relatives, so the song says. While I would love to say that this song is a searing indictment, I find it rather feeble. First, the fussy little syncopated arrangement doesn’t seem to me an effective vehicle for searing political anger. It’s more ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ than ‘Mississippi Goddam’. Then the lyrics: while the word ‘carefully’ is viciously chosen and placed, the rest of it seems to stay in a tone of superior sarcasm (‘It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear’) and then a half-hearted attempt to parody the thing being criticised (‘people whose eyes are oddly made’ ‘people whose skin is a different shade’). And the ‘six or seven or eight’ line just feels like padding. The melody is one of Hammerstein’s least memorable. The song is probably at its most effective in the movie where the deep colours, the close ups and an aggressive orchestration make the song feel more like the turbulent interiority of Cable’s frustration.

Further, the musical does deal in racial stereotyping, in the characterisation of Bloody Mary and the orientalist exoticism of Bali Ha’i. I guess you could say that the musical is deploying the stereotype in order then to wrongfoot us by unexpectedly deepening the representation, but I’m not sure we ever really get a sense of Bloody Mary as much more than a Polynesian Mother Courage, brutal, exploitative, money-chasing. Even her best wishes for Liat are wishes for the luxuries of an American life; she’s more pimp than matchmaker. And while it’s not unreasonable for her to wish a life of comparative luxury for her daughter, the musical would benefit from a little more subtlety in the drawing of her character.

The second thing that struck me as curious in this musical is that people seem to be able to hear the songs. Some of the songs are clearly diegetic: ‘Dites Moi’, ‘Honey Bun’ but there are some odd other moments. Is ‘Bali Ha’i’ actually being sung in the world of the musical? Bloody Mary sings it, but then Billis sings it a little later ‘throatily’, suggesting that he’s heard the song and is awkwardly trying to mimic Mary. Even more strangely, it seems that Nellie really is singing ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair’ because Emile notices and asks where the song came from (and later sings a snatch of it while pretending to wash his hair). Later on, the nurses mockingly mimic Nellie singing ‘I’m in Love With a Wonderful Guy’ as if they can hear her singing. I’ve written elsewhere about the complexity of the so-called integrated musical and, needless to say, this isn’t something that troubles me as I watch it, but on reflection I wonder how far Rodgers and Hammerstein were programmatic about integration - and the sharp separation between diegetic and non-diegetic music - or whether they made it up as they went along, interested in the flexibility of the form and the blurring of fantasy and reality.

These thoughts all occasioned by the Lincoln Centre revival of South Pacific which has just made it to the Barbican with a largely new cast. It’s a good, solid, traditional production that sticks close to the original book. The productions works well; songs sung well, characterisations fresh, bold but serious, and the show kept moving well. The sets and choreography didn’t quite match up to the National Theatre revival a decade ago but the performances were better and the tone surer. Samantha Womack was a very strong Nellie, though she doesn’t get the bluesiness of some of her songs (there’s the middle eight in ‘Wash That Man’ [‘rub him outa the rollcall...’] and that lovely little bridge in ‘Honey Bun’ [‘I am caught and I don’t wanna run / Cos I’m having so much fun with Honey Bun’] which need a whole lot of sassiness, which I didn’t see here), though I felt it was a serious attempt to root her in Arkansas while seem keeping her the romantic dreamer. A decent production.