South Pacific (musical)
South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Michener's work that would be financially successful and, at the same time, send a strong progressive message on racism.
The plot centers on an American nurse stationed on a South Pacific island during World War II, who falls in love with a middle-aged expatriate French plantation owner but struggles to accept his mixed-race children. A secondary romance, between a U.S. Marine lieutenant and a young Tonkinese woman, explores his fears of the social consequences should he marry his Asian sweetheart. The issue of racial prejudice is candidly explored throughout the musical, most controversially in the lieutenant's song, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught". Supporting characters, including a comic petty officer and the Tonkinese girl's mother, help to tie the stories together. Because he lacked military knowledge, Hammerstein had difficulty writing that part of the script. The director of the original production, Logan, assisted him and received credit as co-writer of the book.
The original Broadway production enjoyed immense critical and box-office success, became the second-longest running Broadway musical to that point, and has remained popular ever since. After they signed Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin as the leads, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote several of the songs with the particular talents of their stars in mind. The piece won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950. Especially in the Southern U.S., its racial theme provoked controversy, for which its authors were unapologetic. Several of its songs, including "Bali Ha'i", "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair", "Some Enchanted Evening", "There Is Nothing Like a Dame", "Happy Talk", "Younger Than Springtime", and "I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy", have become popular standards.
The production won ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Libretto, and it is the only musical production to win Tony Awards in all four acting categories. Its original cast album was the bestselling record of the 1940s, and other recordings of the show have also been popular. The show has enjoyed many successful revivals and tours, spawning a 1958 film and television adaptations. The 2008 Broadway revival, a critical success, ran for 996 performances and won seven Tonys, including Best Musical Revival.
Background
Although book editor and university instructor James Michener could have avoided military service in World War II as a birthright Quaker, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in October 1942. He was not sent to the South Pacific theater until April 1944, when he was assigned to write a history of the Navy in the Pacific and was allowed to travel widely. He survived a plane crash in New Caledonia; the near-death experience motivated him to write fiction, and he began listening to the stories told by soldiers. One journey took him to the Treasury Islands, where he discovered an unpleasant village, called Bali-ha'i, populated by "scrawny residents and only one pig". Struck by the name, Michener wrote it down and soon began to record, on a battered typewriter, his version of the tales. On a plantation on the island of Espiritu Santo, he met a woman named Bloody Mary; she was small, almost toothless, her face stained with red betel juice. Punctuated with profanity learned from GIs, she complained endlessly to Michener about the French colonial government, which refused to allow her and other Tonkinese to return to their native Vietnam, lest the plantations be depopulated. She told him also of her plans to oppose colonialism in French Indochina. These stories, collected into Tales of the South Pacific, won Michener the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.Tales of the South Pacific comprises nineteen stories. Each stands independently but revolves around the preparation for an American military operation to dislodge the Japanese from a nearby island. This operation, dubbed Alligator, occurs in the penultimate story, "The Landing at Kuralei". Many of the characters die in that battle, and the last story is titled "A Cemetery at Huga Point". The stories are thematically linked in pairs: the first and final stories are reflective, the second and eighteenth involve battle, the third and seventeenth involve preparation for battle, and so on. The tenth story, at the center, is not paired with any other. This story, "Fo' Dolla' ", was one of only four of his many works that Michener later admitted to holding in high regard. It was the one that attracted Rodgers and Hammerstein's attention for its potential to be converted into a stage work.
"Fo' Dolla' ", set in part on the island of Bali-ha'i, focuses on the romance between a young Tonkinese woman, Liat, and one of the Americans, Marine Lieutenant Joe Cable, a Princeton graduate and scion of a wealthy Philadelphia Main Line family. Pressed to marry Liat by her mother, Bloody Mary, Cable reluctantly declines, realizing that the Asian girl would never be accepted by his family or Philadelphia society. He leaves for battle as Bloody Mary proceeds with her backup plan, to affiance Liat to a wealthy French planter on the islands. Cable struggles, during the story, with his own racism: he is able to overcome it sufficiently to love Liat, but not enough to take her home.
Another source of the musical is the eighth story, "Our Heroine", which is thematically paired with the 12th, "A Boar's Tooth", as both involve American encounters with local cultures. "Our Heroine" tells of the romance between Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, from rural Arkansas, and a wealthy, sophisticated planter, Frenchman Emile De Becque. After falling in love with Emile, Nellie learns that Emile has eight daughters, out of wedlock, with several local women. Michener tells us that "any person ... who was not white or yellow was a nigger" to Nellie, and while she is willing to accept two of the children who remain in Emile's household, she is taken aback by the other two girls who live there, evidence that the planter had cohabited with a darker Polynesian woman. To her great relief, she learns that this woman is dead, but Nellie endangers her relationship with Emile when she is initially unable to accept Emile's "nigger children". Nellie overcomes her feelings and returns to spend her life with her plantation owner.
Additional elements of South Pacific had their genesis in others of Michener's 19 tales. One introduces the character of Bloody Mary; another tells of a British spy hidden on the Japanese-controlled island who relays information about Japanese movements to Allied forces by radio. Michener based the spy, dubbed "the Remittance Man", on Captain Martin Clemens, a Scot, who unlike his fictional counterpart, survived the war. The stories also tell of the seemingly endless waiting that precedes battle, and the efforts of the Americans to repel boredom, which would inspire the song "There Is Nothing Like a Dame". Several of the stories involve the Seabee, Luther Billis, who in the musical would be used both for comic relief and to tie together episodes involving otherwise unconnected characters. A 2001 article in Islands Magazine states that Michener renamed Aoba Island Bali-ha'i. The author interviewed the proprietor of a resort on Espiritu Santo, who claimed that Emile was modeled on his father and that the "real Bloody Mary" lived on Espiritu Santo for many years after the war and lived to the age of 102.
Creation
Inception
In the early 1940s, composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, each a longtime Broadway veteran, joined forces and began their collaboration by writing two musicals that became massive hits, Oklahoma! and Carousel. An innovation for its time in integrating song, dialogue and dance, Oklahoma! would serve as "the model for Broadway shows for decades". In 1999, Time magazine named Carousel the best musical of the century, writing that Rodgers and Hammerstein "set the standards for the 20th-century musical". Their next effort, Allegro, was a comparative disappointment, running for less than a year, although it turned a small profit. After this, the two were determined to achieve another hit.According to director Joshua Logan, a friend of both theatre men, he and Leland Hayward mentioned Michener's best-selling book to Rodgers as a possible basis for the duo's next play, but the composer took no action. Logan recalled that he then pointed it out to Hammerstein, who read Michener's book and spoke to Rodgers; the two agreed to do the project so long as they had majority control, to which Hayward grudgingly agreed. Michener, in his 1992 memoirs, however, wrote that the stories were first pitched as a movie concept to MGM by Kenneth MacKenna, head of the studio's literary department. MacKenna's half brother was Jo Mielziner, who had designed the sets for Carousel and Allegro. Michener states that Mielziner learned of the work from MacKenna and brought it to the attention of Hammerstein and Rodgers, pledging to create the sets if they took on the project.
Hayward attempted to buy the rights from Michener outright, offering $500; Michener declined. Although playwright Lynn Riggs had received 1.5% of the box office grosses for the right to adapt Green Grow the Lilacs into Oklahoma!, Michener never regretted accepting one percent of the gross receipts from South Pacific. As Rodgers and Hammerstein began their work on the adaptation, Michener worked mostly with the lyricist, but Rodgers was concerned about the implications of the setting, fearing that he would have to include ukuleles and guitars, which he disliked. Michener assured him that the only instrument he had ever heard the natives play was an emptied barrel of gasoline, drummed upon with clubs.
From the start of the show's conception, members of the U.S. military were consulted. Hammerstein sought the assistance of the U.S. Navy's Director of the Training and Information Division to help inform the production; and Navy veteran and Broadway financier Harold M. Esty, Jr. was a financial backer of the original production.