South Pacific
Goodspeed Opera House
6 Main St.
East Haddam, CT
Through Aug. 11, 2024
The second time Nellie Forbush hears the end of “Some Enchanted Evening,” she gazes into the distance. Emile de Becque, who’s just proposed to her, draws in, his baritone climbing into falsetto as he vows, once more, to never let her go. He hurls his arms around her. She leans back and, despite swearing him off minutes ago, lets herself be held.
The moment dutifully checks the boxes of quintessential musical theater romance -– the song, the pose, the swell of the orchestra, the sudden shift of the lights into fuchsia, as if by Pavlovian response.
But beneath its facade, it misses the crux of the sweeping reprise: that one person can love another enough to face the worst in herself and try to change.
South Pacific at Goodspeed Opera House, directed by Chay Yew, is a fairly conventional revival of the 1949 musical. Despite modest gestures at complicating the show’s racial politics, Yew’s direction often services the idea of what South Pacific should be. It delivers a hit parade of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s beloved songs and evokes nostalgia for sailors and nurses on tropical beaches, for the illusion that being American used to come with less baggage.
But by breezing past the tangled mess of love with lethal stakes at the musical’s core, the production rarely mines the depths that underpin its politics.
Written with World War II in recent memory, South Pacific is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most overtly progressive musical. Look first, and it’s a romance. Look deeper, and it’s a fable of race, prejudice, and the hypocrisy of patriotism.
Set on a tropical naval base, the show charts parallel love stories torn apart by bigotry. Nellie (Danielle Wade), a nurse from Arkansas, loves Emile (Omar Lopez-Cepero), a French expat, but can’t accept his prior marriage to a Polynesian woman or their mixed children. Lieutenant Cable (Cameron Loyal) falls for Liat (Alex Humphreys), a girl from the island, but won’t bring her home to mainline Philadelphia.
Unlike other Golden Age musicals cast aside for racist depictions of marginalized groups, South Pacific’s treatment of race is precisely why it’s often reexamined. The musical’s critique of white supremacy is explicit, albeit optimistic, and compelling set against its historical context. But played today, Nellie and Lt. Cable’s brazen racism demands steady psychological excavation and a firm directorial hand throughout. Here, Yew reimagines Lt. Cable as a Black officer, a choice that lifts interesting kernels out of the text but unravels when it needs to do the most work.
Just before Lt. Cable sings “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” an examination of learned bigotry that’s become an antiracist anthem, Nellie struggles to justify the root of her prejudice to Emile. She asks Lt. Cable: “Explain how we feel,” but there is no “we” between them.
The song, written as a white man’s confrontation of his own prejudice, becomes a Black man’s explanation of the hate he’s grown up with. The lyric is a tragedy, but a fact not a paradigm shift processed in real time. While Loyal masterfully keeps the lid on Cable’s simmering pain, the song lets a liberal, predominantly white, Connecticut audience off the hook by letting the crowd to feel for Cable, rather than confront the part of him in themselves.
The show’s central love story falls prey to a similar trap. As Nellie, Wade is sunny and spunky, with a rugged twang around the edges of her warm belt. But she and Lopez-Cepero’s Emile never seems equally smitten. His rendition of “This Nearly Was Mine,” Emile’s lament after losing Nellie for what he thinks is the last time, is technically proficient but emotionally hollow. It’s impossible to mourn the love – and future – they lost without having lived in its potential. By leaning too far into Nellie’s ambivalence for Emile early on, the production dampens the impact of her racist rejection after learning about his late wife, as well as the pathos of their ultimate reconciliation.
Late in the show, Yew stages a number from a different, more compelling South Pacific. As the sailors and nurses pack up the base, they reprise “Honey Bun,” Nellie’s drag number from the Thanksgiving show. Over militaristic percussion, then no accompaniment at all, the once playful number loses its innocence. Now, it’s a dirge for the illusion of an island vacation in the midst of a war killing millions. The party’s over, if there was ever a party at all.
