Ripples upset mighty Pacific
South Pacific
By Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (with Joshua Logan)
Lincoln Centre Theatre/Opera Australia/ John Frost
Crown Theatre
REVIEW DAVID ZAMPATTI
What we have here is the Australian touring production of the smash 2008 Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic 1949 musical adaptation of James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific.
The popular New Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes has been engaged to play plantation boss Emile De Becque alongside Australia's sweetheart and Perth's own Lisa McCune's Nellie Forbush.
The talented cast includes Mitchell Butel as Luther Billis, Christine Anu as Bloody Mary and a chorus including, like McCune, another half-dozen WAAPA alumni.
Director Bartlett Sher, who won one of the Broadway production's seven Tony Awards, remains at the helm along with his original creative team.
With that pedigree and talent, you'd be confident very little could go wrong.
South Pacific is more than romantic froth and bubble under swaying palm trees, of course. The US of 1949 had emerged from the twin catastrophes of the Depression and World War II with its self-belief intact, and its new cadre of heroes - the Greatest Generation - firmly installed in its pantheon. The scars they had suffered and the shadow of storms ahead might have been largely out of sight but for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein they were far from out of mind.
It had been only four years since US Marines were bloodily island-hopping their way towards Japan through the same dots on the map on which South Pacific is set, and it would be only another eight years later that General, now President, Eisenhower would order a division of the US Army to escort nine frightened children to school in Nellie Forbush's sweet home town, Little Rock, Arkansas, because of the colour of their skin.
Sher is punctilious in keeping these sinister, painful events front and centre and adds layers of his own. It takes a while to register that the three non-white sailors in the chorus are always at the back or the sides of the main corps - there, but apart; and it delivers a chill when you do.
There's plenty else to ponder in the story of the romance of the French planter De Becque and the small-town flower Forbush, the heroic, doomed Lt Cable (the handsome Blake Bowden) the Vietnamese girl Liat (Celina Yuen) and her mother, the souvenir merchant and pimp Bloody Mary (Anu).
Cable's insight into racism in You've Got to be Carefully Taught may be an oddity in a Broadway musical but it fits perfectly into this one.
There are all the other wonderful songs: the great ballads, Some Enchanted Evening, Younger than Springtime and This Nearly was Mine; and roistering chorus numbers There is Nothin' Like a Dame (the biggest hit with a somewhat subdued audience) and Bloody Mary. There is also some really funny hamming, especially from the outstanding Butel.
But some things do go wrong, and it starts at the top. Rhodes is a gigantic figure on stage, his big frame made even bigger by his operatic baritone, but his presence, especially in dialogue, amplified and in an accent that seems a couple of countries east of French, is - I hate to say this - almost Schwarzeneggerian. De Becque may have won the affection of Forbush and his young children but he'd have frightened the life out of me.
McCune seems to get more petite with each outing and her clinches with Rhodes are like a squirrel being hugged by a bear. Some of her performances, too, fade a little, and that's a problem in a show where her songs - I'm Gonna Wash that Man Right Outta My Hair, A Wonderful Guy, Honey Bun and A Cockeyed Optimist - provide much of the snap, crackle and pop.
And I don't know what happened to Happy Talk but all the happy was drained out of it by a malarial Cable, a sullen Liat and a depressing Bloody Mary.
South Pacific is a mighty achievement and a great show. This one has much to like but, as tropical island weather goes, it was some degrees short of a heat wave.
South Pacific runs at the Crown Theatre until December 8.
