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South Pacific, by Rodgers & Hammerstein
Mar. 5th, 2014 10:54 pmSaw South Pacific performed tonight. It's a World War II musical set on an unnamed South Pacific island. It was a good enough story, combining war, romance, and soldierly hi-jinks. It's the third Rodgers & Hammerstein that I've seen performed, though I don't really remember Oklahoma (which I think I saw in 1984 in St. Louis).
I found South Pacific particularly interesting in contrast with A Sound of Music, which I'm pretty familiar with, having seen the film, the sing-a-long film, and the musical. They both focus on Spring/Autumn romances between a widower and a young professional woman. They both include children. And they're both set in WWII. One of South Pacific's songs, "Some Enchanted Evening" could easily have been a song for the Captain and Maria. Where A Sound of Music brings its newly created family together midway with music, South Pacific does so as the finale.
South Pacific is also sort of interesting because it has more parallel plot lines than A Sound of Music. There are two parallel romances (though one gets short shrift), plus a major tactical element of the war that the two romantic leads engage in, plus the hi-jinks from the bad-boy enlisted men. I was also quite surprised to hear "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" near the end of the play, which is a rather bitter ode against bigotry. Pretty strong stuff for 1949.
The production itself was fair. One energetic pianist provided the music throughout the entire production (with a few breaks). There were rather surprisingly stages on two walls, and sometimes action went back and forth between them (though it was mostly on the front stage). The actual show was part of dinner-and-threatre too, which is a fun tradition.
Overall, an enjoyable evening and one that makes me hope to see more Rodgers and Hammerstein now that I've collected three of the corpus.
I found South Pacific particularly interesting in contrast with A Sound of Music, which I'm pretty familiar with, having seen the film, the sing-a-long film, and the musical. They both focus on Spring/Autumn romances between a widower and a young professional woman. They both include children. And they're both set in WWII. One of South Pacific's songs, "Some Enchanted Evening" could easily have been a song for the Captain and Maria. Where A Sound of Music brings its newly created family together midway with music, South Pacific does so as the finale.
South Pacific is also sort of interesting because it has more parallel plot lines than A Sound of Music. There are two parallel romances (though one gets short shrift), plus a major tactical element of the war that the two romantic leads engage in, plus the hi-jinks from the bad-boy enlisted men. I was also quite surprised to hear "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" near the end of the play, which is a rather bitter ode against bigotry. Pretty strong stuff for 1949.
The production itself was fair. One energetic pianist provided the music throughout the entire production (with a few breaks). There were rather surprisingly stages on two walls, and sometimes action went back and forth between them (though it was mostly on the front stage). The actual show was part of dinner-and-threatre too, which is a fun tradition.
Overall, an enjoyable evening and one that makes me hope to see more Rodgers and Hammerstein now that I've collected three of the corpus.