p.s. as for groanalot's comment about SP closing in a week ... I'm happy to say it is now running till at least Jan 2009 :-)
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Theater of War
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Most of these characters were based on real people, as captured by James Michener in his 1947 book "Tales of the South Pacific," which inspired the musical (and which also won a Pulitzer). Michener had been stationed during the war on the island of Espíritu Santo—a stopover for half a million servicemen on their way to such horrific battles as Guadalcanal and Tarawa—and he fictionalized the stories he'd witnessed or heard. There were Navy nurses such as Nellie, an Emile-like French planter and even a young sailor from Alabama who refused to go home—and take the heat—for having a native girlfriend who was pregnant. Sher probed Michener's book, as well as early versions of the Hammerstein-Logan script, in preparing for this new "South Pacific." He even restored, in Nellie's agonized speech about the Polynesian mother of Emile's children, her use of the word "colored," which originally had been cut. He also projects Michener's words on a scrim to open the show, and to close it with this: "They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge."
You'd be hard-pressed to argue that we're deep in the shadows even yet, considering how much attention the "greatest generation" still receives. Younger audiences may find it quaint that a war sparked such universal support and that race was such a divisive issue. But in addition to the issues, there are the immense pleasures of this production, with its first-rate cast and the music that so magically evokes both the exoticism and emotionalism of the story. Rodgers, Hammerstein and Logan understood their characters profoundly and created a mirror of America that was sophisticated but never cynical. "South Pacific" is about the way we were—and the way we are, even now.
© 2008
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