South Pacific

We took in the Broadway revival of South Pacific last night. Very handsome production, though I wish I'd seen the original cast. I've never been a big fan of the musical but I have to blame that on the stiff movie version and the subsequent TV version because, like most of Rodgers & Hammerstein's work it's pretty solid from song to song to song. This is why modern musicals are so often not wonderful, as they usually have to rely on one or two killer songs/hooks to get them through two plus hours. You need at least four or five!

Mitzi Gaynor sings in outside the shower

If you're an overachiever like West Side Story, you don't take any chances and only allow superlative classics into your song score. Literally any of those numbers could carry entire lesser musicals through long rough patches.

I thought the recent TV version with Glenn Close was close to unwatchable. Not sure why I had that reaction, but I did. Maybe it's all the icky dated romantic stuff? I mean, I love "Carefully Taught", one of the most succinct and potent songs ever written about racism and prejudice. But then that beautiful message gets all bogged down in weirdly creepy 50s sexual politics. Like My Fair Lady, South Pacific ends with such a conservative 'a woman's place is in the home' worldview that it's hard to really get behind. And that's not the half of it.

The second tier romance in the movie/play is more troubling. The big romantic ballad "Younger Than Springtime isn't as quite as creepy as Gigi's "Thank Heaven For Little Girls" but it's just as emphatic about women being desirable only if they're young. [Have you ever heard Annie Lennox's retro skewering of this mentality? So fun]

Lt Cable has a thing for young Asians: film version (John Kerr),
current B'way (Andrew Samonsky), TV movie (Harry Connick Jr)
and original B'way cast (Matthew Morrison from Glee. Yay!)

Even though the show is morally right-on about love being color blind, it's still asking you to swoon for two complicated and one ethically questionable romance. The lead romance involves a much older man who lies (or at least hides the truth) to a young woman he'd like as the mother of his two children. The secondary romance involves a man and younger woman who can't even communicate (but for hot sex)... and she's basically been pimped by her entrepreneurial mother! You're definitely supposed to think that Lt. Cable scored by getting a girl that's "younger than springtime". Creepy!

Have you seen any versions of South Pacific and do you find it easy to ignore the politically sexually questionable politics in old movies/classics? Do you wash those memes right out of your hair?
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