Reviews
Nunn conjures some enchanted evening on the South Bank
Review by Benedict Nightingale The Times 13/12/2001
IF YOU saw the film of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, you’ll probably remember it for gorgeously shimmering landscapes and leaping American tars, a painfully clean Mitzi Gaynor as Nurse Nellie from Little Rock, and the glamorously greying Rossano Brazzi (complete with white stallion) as Emile, the French planter with whom she falls in love only to be put off by the fact he’s had two children by a Polynesian.
Oh yes — and you’ll certainly remember Some Enchanted Evening, This Nearly Was Mine and lots of other hums so addictive I still hear them in my dreams.
Well, Trevor Nunn’s revival has a bit more social edge and emotional clout, but, take or leave Gaynor, Brazzi and that white stallion, it isn’t essentially different. Don’t expect much harshness or darkness.
Despite the odd filmed projection of tanks or ships, don’t expect too many painful reminders that this is 1942 and a murderous war is unfolding in Polynesia. Don’t expect quite the sense of a masterpiece rediscovered that Nunn’s production of Oklahoma! recently gave us.
Yet there are touching moments, especially towards the end, and some fine ones, especially near the start. You can hear the testosterone bubble when some beefy soldiers, trapped in their island para‘dise, launch into There’s Nothing Like a Dame, a number that comes across as a protest- song against terminal frustration. When Lauren Kennedy’s Nellie gamely warbled I’m Going to Wash That Guy Right Outa My Hair, meaning Philip Quast’s Emile, I had to stop myself singing along.
Kennedy’s Nellie glistens and gleams, at times too much for my taste.
Yet she belies the initial impression, which is of a sporty belle whose teeth would give you snow-blindness. She ends up making you feel that, yes, love can conquer prejudice. Again, Quast’s Emile at first seems too rumpled and shambling for a plausible love-object, but turns out to pack a fair amount of passion behind his champignon face and leaves you feeling the same.
That’s good, because the show’s defence of miscegenation was what upset some audiences back in 1949, when it first appeared, and actually got it picketed when it toured the South. True, the authors felt obliged to kill off the nice young lieutenant who falls for an Asian girl before their affair could. lead to anything as unmentionable as marriage. But they compensated with a song that still zings and bites: “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made or skin is of a different shade, you’ve got to be carefully taught.”
Why Matthew Bourne is credited with the choreography I don’t know, for there’s nothing to match the dances he invented for My Fair Lady. Almost every opportunity for an imaginative rattle of feet is missed.
But by the end, I didn’t care. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Quast and Kennedy, had me by the lump in my throat. What was that I surreptitiously rubbed away as I dashed off to pen this review? That’s right, a tear.
Head South and you’ll be enchanted
South Pacific by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan: Royal National Theatre
Review by Michael Coveney The Daily Mail 13/12/2001
NEWSREELS and con fused reports show the Americans all at sea in a foreign territory with an incomplete war on their hands and snipers everywhere.
Relax, it’s only a musical. Here, given the works by the National Theatre and Trevor Nunn, we have the restored drama of James Michener’s original novel with dreams of paradise, ethnic prejudice, and a classic score.
A loud boo for a programme that does not list the musical numbers, nor describe the adjustments to the script, especially when two songs have been reinstated from the film and Broadway premiere, with telling consequences.
Some Enchanted Evening runs like a thread through the romance of Nellie For- bush, the young nurse from Arkansas, who falls for a middle-aged French plantation owner, Emile, before she knows he has children by a Polynesian.
And Lieutenant Joseph Cable is a long way from Philadelphia on his trip to Bali Hal, where he is allotted the girl he falls in love with (Younger Than Springtime) and loses his life on a trip behind enemy lines.
South Pacific in 1949 described the American unease after Pearl Harbour and shines like a beacon between Madam Butterfly and Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures as an acid musical of American imperialism on the road.
Nunn’s revival, magically designed by John Napier with exquisite lighting by David Hersey, is every bit as good as the RNT’s previous Rodgers and Hammersteins, Carousel and Oklahoma!
A sparkling new American star Lauren Kennedy, makes the Mary Martin role of Nellie her own: in youth, freshness and the emotional journey she makes from Little Rock to multi-racial understanding. Her song, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair, along with several others, is slowed down to great effect by musical director Stephen Brooker.
Philip Quast is superb as the Frenchman, undercutting the operatic element in his great arias, especially This Nearly Was Mine.
A few microphoning problems and musical tinniness cannot dim my delight in Nick Holder’s belly-wobbling Luther Billis (‘one hundred and one pounds of fun, that’s my little honey bun’), nor the show as a whole.
Another triumph for the showstoppers at the National. You simply can’t say it’s ‘just’ musical theatre— but of course there is lots of lust’ musical theatre as the night proceeds.
There is a Thanksgiving concert for the cheering troops, there are careering Jeeps and gun carriages and an air of activity and bartering on an island where the mercenary spirit has not been dampened by the reality of war.
Nunn brings out all the nuances in the characterizations of the invaded, the hospitable and the troops abroad. People are either a long way from home or yearning to be somewhere else.
And this is where the wonderful music of Richard Rodgers so brilliantly captures the dramatic dilemmas.
The music fully complements each dramatic stage of the story and is always there, flagging the next development or summarising the last surprise.
In this, Nunn’s production proves its absolute vitality and lasting worth.
Intimate tale of US troops wins against cynical snipers
- South Pacific, Olivier Theatre, London
- Review by Rhoda Koenig Independent 13/12/2001
At a time when some of our ostensible best minds opine that America "had it coming'', and an optimist, cockeyed or otherwise, is someone who hasn't heard the news, what price South Pacific? Was Trevor Nunn the overly optimistic one for reviving the 1949 musical about troops waiting to go into action against "the Japs''?
Well, the verdict can be delivered in one letter: V. South Pacific doesn't overpower you, like My Fair Lady, with its glamour or brilliance – not only are Oscar Hammerstein's book and lyrics serviceable rather than witty; the production, on a smaller and shallower stage than the Lyttleton is far more modest.
But the greater intimacy of this show makes it more affecting: as the sensuous beauty of the island overpowers the American characters' conventional pieties, the show overcomes our own cynicism and knowingness.
It helps that Philip Quast's Emile is not a tall, God-like figure but a dumpy, rumpled one, consumed with worry that the American nurse Nellie Forbush will not return his love. And that Nellie's constant cheer has a slightly nervous quality to it.
To strengthen the atmosphere, Nunn had rearranged the story, he plunges us right into the restlessness of a quivering clutch of servicemen without occupation or dames.
The most prominent female is the fat souvenir-seller Bloody Mary, whom Sheila Francisco makes a real, full-blooded woman instead of the usual grinning cartoon.
Potential hazards are dealt with in style – the jingly "Happy Talk'' is now Bloody Mary's fervent plea for the lieutenant who has been sleeping with her daughter to marry the girl, pathetically painting the idyllic life they will have if he can conquer his race prejudice. The Lieutenant's song "Carefully Taught'' has been speeded up, making it more emotional and removing the stench of preachiness.
A fabulous cast includes Lauren Kennedy as a wonderfully brassy-tender Nellie, Edward Baker-Duly as the clean-cut, anguished Lieutenant, Nick Holder as a flabby, fast-talking small-time Sergeant Bilko, and the fine John Shrapnel as the humane but comically exasperated Commander of the island.
Nunn has reset Emile's great ballad "This Nearly Was Mine" to the island where he is making secret radio transmissions to the post. It seems a bit odd for him to be holding forth when he's supposed to be hiding from the Japanese, but all one can say is, if they don't hear him, that's their loss. As it will be yours if you miss this.
Spectacular if sickly
South Pacific at the National Theatre
Review by Charles Spencer The Telegraph 14/12/01
THE great composer Richard Rodgers was justifiably proud of South Pacific before it opened on Broadway in 1949. In one of those late-night tinkering and cutting sessions without which no new musical sees the light of day, he cheerfully announced: "Fellers, the show is perfect. Let's go to bed."
More than half a century on, South Pacific doesn't seem quite so perfect in Trevor Nunn's handsome new staging at the National's Olivier. There is no disguising the fact that in this Rodgers and Hammerstein show, honest sentiment sometimes curdles into sickly sentimentality, nor that the plot sometimes plods.
And after the triumphant revival of Peter Nichols's Privates on Parade at the Donmar Warehouse earlier this week - another musical about war and miscegenation set in the southern hemisphere in the Forties - South Pacific seems desperately old-fashioned in its tub-thumping US patriotism and sheer wholesomeness.
Nichols's more jaundiced vision, and his vastly superior jokes, speak more eloquently to a present-day audience.
Nevertheless, South Pacific looks terrific in John Napier's fine design, which makes evocative use of projected newsreel to conjure up the wartime atmosphere, and photographic back-projections to capture the beauty of the Polynesian island where the American troops wait to take on the Japs.
Nunn also fills the stage with all his usual flair and confidence, though Matthew Bourne's choreography is nothing like as exciting, or as inventive, as his earlier work on the all-male Swan Lake and the NT's My Fair Lady.
The great There is Nothing Like a Dame sequence may be testosterone on legs, but elsewhere there is worrying evidence of a flagging choreographic imagination.
The director also takes the piece at far too sluggish a pace - three and a quarter hours is at least half an hour too long. The show's potent story of racial prejudice, in which our heroine is disgusted by the fact that her beloved French planter has previously had children by a Polynesian woman, and our all-American hero abandons his Tonkinese girlfriend because of worries about what his mother might say, would have greater impact if the story were told more crisply.
The singing of the matchless score is excellent, however, and the spectacle - all palm trees, whizzing jeeps and spectacular sunsets - is often breathtaking.
Nunn also finds the story's emotional truth and makes the most of the sometimes leaden humour, though Rodgers and Hammerstein's use of cute kiddies to get the audience purring does seem grotesquely manipulative.
Lauren Kennedy is a toothy, goofy Nellie Forbrush, but she is a terrific dancer, exuberantly sexy and funny during I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair, and genuinely poignant when she realises how absurd her prejudices have been, and what they appear to have cost her.
The golden-voiced Philip Quast is splendidly debonair as the object of her affections, Emile de Becque, and there is a real chemistry between the two of them.
Edward Baker-Duly is a muscular but charisma-free Lieut Cable, and his brisk deflowering of the island girl Liat after she has been pimped to him by her mother now seems distasteful.
Sheila Francisco, as wide as she is tall, offers great entertainment value as Bloody Mary, however, and in a great night for fatties, the massively beer-bellied Nick Holder almost steals the show as the amiably corrupt Luther Billis.
The show may not be in the same league as the National's earlier musical hits, but at its best, as the song says, it offers some enchanted evening.
South Pacific National Theatre, London 3 star rating
Extract from a review that appeared in the Guardian 13/12/01 by Michael Billington
...the songs are first-rate...
...Philip Quast as the French planter, with a white streak in his hair that made him the big romantic number was a resonant passion. Nick Holder had also endowed the profiteering Luther Billis with a predatory gleam. John Shrapnel was all tactical urgency playing the iron-bellied captain.
We would like to Thank RNT fro providing us with the information and allowing us to use their South Pacific Logos and pictures.
Extracts from Review by Darren Dalglish The London Theatre Guide 13/12/01
Trevor Nunn’s revival of this classic musical is not as good as it should be. Many of the leading actors fail to impress and the choreography is poor. However, it has a good story with many great songs so the show still entertains!
....The story is set during the Second World War on a small island in the South Seas where Nellie, a US Navy nurse, falls for Emile de Becque, a French planter, and Lt Joe Cable finds love with the daughter of Bloody Mary, a Tonkinese trader. However, their feelings are tested when they have to confront their racism and by a top-secret spy mission undertaken against the Japanese fleet from behind enemy lines which places the two men in danger....
....Philip Quast as Emile, a French planter, and Sheila Francisco as Bloody Mary, save the show. The dependable Quast produces a solid performance and brings to the show the much-needed passion. You believe in his character as he goes from happiness to despair. He also has a powerful and clear singing voice. The same with Sheila Francisco, she produces a touching and delightful performance that makes you feel for her character....
.....John Napier’s exotic set design works beautifully in capturing the essence of an island with palm trees, beautiful backdrops with a rippling sea and blue sky, along with trees and two real jeeps to boot....
....Lasting 3 hours and 15 minutes, “South Pacific” is a great musical, but this is not a great production. Nevertheless, it still has some marvellous songs such as “Some Enchanted Evening” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair”. And with a moving ending it is still worth seeing.
South Pacific
Extracts from a review by Robert Gore-Langton Daily Express 13/12/01
I’m in love with a wonderful girl and her name is Lauren Kennedy. A relative unknown, she plays Ensign Nellie Forbush in the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic and she dazzles you with her looks and cockeyed optimism. Whether washing that man right out of her hair or kicking merry hell out of the show’s big dance numbers, she lends the show true glitz….
…there are strong performances from Philip Quast as Nellie’s French lover de Becque…
… it still makes you want to put on a grass skirt and go Balai Ha’ing down the Thames embankment.
South Pacific
Extract from a review by Christopher Downes West End Extra 14/12/01
....Nunn’s production is excitingly designed by John Napier, a real jeep, exotic sunsets and palm trees everywhere....
....Philip Quest is better as the planter Emil de Becque even if he is not the matinee idol required, but he sings well, especially This Nearly Was Mine.
Sheila Francisco as Bloody Mary steals the show. Funny and pow- erfully emotional, her Happy Talk number is a highlight. Also very good as the young lieutenant Cable is Edward Baker-Duly, caught in the same trap as Nellie, and in love with Bloody Mary’s beautiful daughter (Elaine Tan).
....But the wonderful songs come to the rescue whenever the plot sags. This score is one of Rogers and Hammerstein’s greatest...
South Pacific is a riot
Extracts from a review by Jackie Finlay BBC News Online 14/12/01
Trevor Nunn's follow-up to My Fair Lady, a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 40s classic musical South Pacific, has been widely anticipated.
Trevor Nunn's follow-up to My Fair Lady, a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 40s classic musical South Pacific, has been widely anticipated. Another lavish musical, another production with more than an eye to the National's box office.
The question - apart from whether the National should be staging such shows - has been whether the show would repeat My Fair Lady's runaway success.
On first glance, the answer is it could well do - Nunn has teamed up again with Matthew Bourne as choreographer to produce a show of enormous energy and fun, with a good ensemble cast and a beautiful set.
The sexual frustration of the US army boys and girls stationed on a remote island in World War II shines through in the marvellously physical crowd numbers, Nothing Like A Dame and Wash That Man Right Out Of my Hair.
Meanwhile the show's more serious themes - racism, inequality and the inhumanity of war - work well for a 21st Century audience.
Nunn makes a serious attempt to deal with these sensitively, and uses the set to make his points for him - as the show opens, the serenity of the island is destroyed by exercising soldiers.
The production also makes the most throughout of a jeep and anti-aircraft gun that should really have programme billing, the number of appearances they make.
Charm
The racial prejudice of the two central characters, Lieutenant Joe Cable and Ensign Nellie Forbush, is tackled head-on, using the audience's loss of sympathy for the characters as a dramatic force.
We are kept hooked as Joe is destroyed by confrontation with his inner self, while Nellie, in her own crisis, finds strength and a second chance for happiness.
....But Lauren Kennedy as Nellie has undoubted charm and a great voice, which could be exploited even further.
She would benefit from a stronger stage presence to carry solo scenes, but hopefully that will come.
Her beau, Philip Quast as the mysterious Frenchman Emile de Becque, also uses his superb voice to great effect and lends the production a serious mien, ....
....Sheila Francisco is excellent - perhaps the best in the show - as a larger than life Bloody Mary, the island trader who becomes closely involved in the characters' lives.
....Edward Baker-Duly as the doomed Lieutenant Joe Cable gives a sensitive portrayal as the all-American boy from Princeton who ends up destroyed by the islands.
Overall, this is another cracking show, with its few flaws unlikely to stop anyone having a great night out.
'South Pacific' National Theatre
Review by Jane Edwardes, Time Out December 19, 2001
Those people who remember Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical for its tuneful melodies, energetic choreography and schmaltzy account of cross-cultural love might get a bit of a shock if they go to the National. Director Trevor Nunn has gone back to the original James A Michener stories and firmly places the music and dancing in the back seat. Newsreel of the Americans arriving in the Pacific during WWII is introduced at the beginning, and the members of the Construction Battalion, led by Nick Holder as the Sergeant Bilko- like Luther, actually look beefy enough to be in the army. Instead of male chorus boys frolicking on the beach, Matthew Bourne's almost naturalistic choreography does not jar with the more realistic setting - nor does John Napier's revolving set ever fall into the trap of looking like an ad for Kuoni.
The effect, however, is to make the ‘4Os sentimentality and patriotism even more absurd. R&H took the subject of the Pacific War and superimposed two romantic stories wedded to the belief of lasting love at first sight. Joe Cable takes advantage of Bloody Mary's invitation to go to bed with her daughter and yet we are still expected to have faith that he will overcome his prejudices and whisk the young Liat away -if only a Japanese bomb didn't conveniently get in the way. In the second strand, Nellie Forbush, a nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, falls for a middle-aged French planter until she is repelled by the discovery of his Polynesian children. Lauren Kennedy makes a winning Nellie with perfect teeth, and is even sympathetic as she wrestles with her racism. Philip Quast as Emile is touchingly abashed by his love for her, the evening first coming to life musically when he sings 'Some Enchanted Evening'. One of Trevor Nunn's few faults as a director is his determination to extract every ounce of juice out of his material. But 'South Pacific' is too much of a melodrama to sustain over three hours in the theatre. By the end, it feels like an impressive effort rather than a knockout success.
Extracts from a review by Robert Gore-Langton, Sunday Express 16/12/01
Of the nine shows Oscar Hammerstein wrote with Richard Rodgers, the National has done three in the past 10 years. After Carousel and Oklahoma! Comes South Pacific – and the reason is obvious. It’s the songs. Classics that those two writers seemed to tear off by the yard. In this show you get ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair’, ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ , ‘Bali Ha’i’, ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’…They’re as bullet proof as Beatles classics.
But if you liked the film of South Pacific, you must see this show. It’s got palm trees, but also all the bits missing in the movie (i.e., some drama), and it puts back centre stage the guts of James Michener’s novel, on which it is based.
The cast is terrific. None more so than the delectable Lauren Kennedy as Ensign Nellie Forbush the homely gal from Little Rock, Arkansas, whose life is changed by her love affair with French planter Emile de Becque – played with Gallic sexiness by Philip Quast. Then there’s the affair between young Lieutenant Cable and a local native girl – a doomed fling that crosses the racial fence and gets impaled on it. It’s amazing how the romances emerge so credibly.
…a corking rendition of what is probably the most universally admired achievement of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s bounteous partnership.
Extracts from a review by John Gross, Sunday Telegraph 16/12/01
…South Pacific, at the Olivier Theatre (sponsored by Barclays), is a blockbuster: confident, glamorous, ultra-professional, all-American.
…It opens, thrillingly, with a collage of newsreel film from the Pacific war projected on to a big cylindrical screen; then we get rippling waves, then the screen melts away and we’re on a Polynesian island (where we ain’t got dames). John Napier has supplied some splendid designs: solid looking palm-trees, a veranda with a view, lush vegetation, sunsets which aren’t too sunsetty. The military hardware runs to a couple of real live jeeps, and the period atmosphere is neatly caught. It’s a bit like leafing through old copies of Life magazine or the National Geographic, in the days when colour photos in magazines were still a novelty.
Then there is the score, which is the one aspect of any production of the show which no one is likely to argue about. The indestructible tunes keep flowing along, and on this occasion some of them also gain from reinterpretation or repositioning on Trevor Nunn’s part. In particular, the character of Bloody Mary, the rotund native souvenir-seller, is given more depth. It no longer seems incongruous that she should switch straight from her huckstering to the haunting strains of ‘Bali Ha’I’, while her subsequent number ‘Happy Talk’ has much more pathos than usual. The part is notably well performed too, by Sheila Francisco.
Of the two principals, Philip Quast as the middle-aged French planter Emile de Becque is the more immediately winning: he’s got rumpled charm, and a fine voice which soars when he wants it to. About Lauren Kennedy, as Nellie Forbush, the young nurse from Little Rock, you at first feel more divided. She is as dazzling and clean cut as a toothpaste advertisement: whatever the weapons in her armoury, mystery isn’t one of them. But then that’s the part. She plays it with great spirit and skill, and she wins through. By the end you are genuinely fond of her, and you are warmed – within the limits of the show – by her success in sloughing off inherited Little Rock prejudice.
Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote the book of South Pacific, had a message to deliver, against racial bigotry – an enterprising message for the Broadway of its time, over 50 years ago. But wisely, Nunn doesn’t push this aspect of the show too hard. If he had, he would have run up with a thud against the sentimentality of much of the plot and characterisation. Much better to let the little song about children being taught to hate speak for itself, as he does, rather than ramming it home. There are some excellent supporting performances, especially from John Shrapnel as the commander of the island base and Nick Holder as a cheerfully venal fixer with an eye for a quick buck…it [still] sweeps you along.
Nunn’s South Pacific sails past the heart
Extracts from a review by Matt Wolf, Variety December 17-23, 2001
When important things happen," we're told midway through the very long first act of Trevor Nunn's new London revival of "South Pacific," "one has a feeling about it." My initial feeling about the Royal National Theater's third and latest Rodgers & Hammerstein reclamation is that it doesn't equal the company's "Oklahoma!" and "Carousel." That’s to set, admittedly, a formidably high bar for an occasion whose importance (even, it has to be said, self importance) is never in doubt: Nunn has done his homework, and buffs everywhere will thrill at, among other things, the chance to hear forgotten numbers like "Now Is the Time" and "My Girl Back Home" (both dropped prior to the 1949 Broadway preem), not to mention the presence in Matthew Bourne of the most celebrated choreographer this musical has yet enjoyed (the Joshua Logan directed original didn't even have one). The result is a serious and exhaustive - some will say exhausting - reassessment of a defining American musical that justifies its place in the National repertoire (where it will do exceedingly well) without making a case for the longer life that the same address' previous R&H entries have done.
....much as Philip Quast's excitingly sung Emile de Becque yearns for Arkansas "hick" Nellie Forbush (Lauren Kennedy)....
....Instead, we're left with the fleshy Australian-born Quast physically and culturally cast against type as the "slim" (or so the program tells us) French plantation owner Emile, and yet singing up the sort of storm that characteristically for this gifted performer sends shivers down the spine. ....
....In interpretive terms, the show's primary coup rests with the hefty (in every sense) Bloody Mary of Sheila Francisco, who positions the role well away from the roly-poly comic relief presented by Bertice Reading in this show's last London revival in 1998.
There's a revelatory urgency to the "Bali Ha'i" that this island mercenary sings early on to Cable, her second-act "Happy Talk" never, has that song seemed more ironically titled subsequently delivered as an act of near-desperation, as if she knows that the doomed Cable represents her daughter's best and last chance. (Also excellent: John Shrapnel as a definitively dry, straight-talking Brackett, the island's commanding officer.) These are all gifts available to a "South Pacific" that can afford to reconsider the material anew, away from the pressures of the commercial marketplace....
South Pacific
Olivier
Review by Lisa Martland, The Stage Newspaper 20/12/01
Picture by Tristram Kenton
It is easy to join the bandwagon and criticise the subsidised National for staging crowd pleasing musicals. But when the theatre comes up with such a top notch production as this, these quibbles tend to fall by the wayside.
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning work is a genuine classic, for its universal themes of conflict and racial intolerance, compelling drama and memorable score are still a joy to revisit 52 years on.
As we witness the events taking place on two Polynesian islands during the Second World War, director Trevor Nunn strikes the balance between zooming in on the individual stories while keeping an eye on the larger battle taking place beyond (and even restoring some original songs and dialogue).
American Lauren Kennedy as Ensign Nellie Forbush – battling with her conscience over her love for enigmatic French planter Emil de Becque (Philip Quast) – is a star in the making. During numbers such as A Cockeyed Optimist and Wonderful Guy her energy and enthusiasm are impossible to resist, while she has the acting ability to hold her own in the serious scenes.
Quast too is impressive, his rich rendition of This Nearly Was Mine brings a tear to the eye. In fact, acting accolades can be awarded across the board – Edward Baker-Duly and Sheila Francisco are perfectly cast as Lt Joe Cable and Bloody Mary respectively. Likewise Nick Holder gives a strong comic performance in the role of profiteering 'Seabee' Luther Billis.
The lighter side of the piece is also boosted by Matthew Bourne's musical staging, which from the uplifting opening number onwards pays the show the respect it deserves, yet leaves it fresh and sexy too.
And thank goodness for a group of male performers who actually have the look of soldiers rather than camp followers. When designer John Napier uses vast photographs of the picturesque islands as a backdrop – in addition to Pathe-style war footage – it is easy to believe these men are genuinely hot and frisky.
Some Enchanted Evenings
Review by John Peter, The Sunday Times, 23/12/2001
At the end of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific the Olivier auditorium erupted in a standing ovation. This tends to happen at first nights of musicals; it happened in the same theatre at the end of My Fair Lady; but I also recall it happening here 11 years ago at a weekday performance, not a press night, of Hamlet starring the late Ian Charleson.
The point I am labouring to make is that the serious theatre is a broad church: it should try to accommodate everything from Aeschylus to R&H. Yes, there ought to be a proper debate about the place of musicals at the National. I certainly think that two in the same year is too many. My Fair Lady and South Pacific between them will have colonised the Olivier for a total of 40 weeks. The National Theatre of Great Britain should always have a Shakespeare and/or a pre-20th-century English classic in its repertory. We have not had one of those since The Relapse ended in mid-November and will not have another for the next six months at least.
So there. Basta. Having got that off my chest, I have to report that Trevor Nunn's production of South Pacific is a big, glorious, resounding five-star event: moving, funny, serious, a first-rate piece of storytelling that combines big, vigorous showmanship with devoted attention to detail. In brief, an enchanted evening
The setting is a South Pacific island in the second world war, and the danger lies in comparing this work with Full Metal Jacket, say, or Apocalypse Now. But these islands are a backwater in the big conflict; these people are stranded in enforced inactivity; and the lyrics and book, by Oscar Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, take an oblique, mellow view of this restless, frustrated bunch of humanity.
South Pacific is about crossing borders. The US army is only the latest arrival on these islands. French traders had settled here and they brought Chinese labour with them, and so islands are, for everyone except the natives, an alien land: a refuge, an exile, an opportunity, a combination of possibilities, temptations and magic.
Another border to be crossed is race. Can a clean American boy marry an Asian girl, or a clean American girl a Frenchman who has had a Polynesian wife? Hammerstein and Logan's treatment is sharp and pointed, unafraid of tackling bigotry and prejudice, but it is also warm-hearted, humane, ironical and hopeful. Five decades on, the show's mature humanity still touches the heart.
Philip Quast is the French planter, a big, wary but relaxed man in vigorous middle age; his rumpled appearance suggests that no woman cares for him, only domestics. He has a velvety, warm baritone, which he uses like a master. Lauren Kennedy is Nellie, a wide-eyed gazelle, glossy with innocence. Observe the moment when she and Quast have their first drink: Nellie, fresh from Arkansas, doesn't quite know how to hold a brandy glass and swirl the contents. The whole production is full of such touches. Nunn keeps the large cast moving with awesome expertise but without ever losing the focus. Sheila Francisco is Bloody Mary, a big roly-poly woman with a big, caressing voice; Nick Holder is irresistibly funny as the lovable wise-cracking cynic, without whom no vintage American musical is complete. There are two real Jeeps trundling around the revolve, which will please all excitable spectacle addicts.
We would like to thank Gregor Dickson for taking the time tosend us this interview
Review by Louise Kingsley Footloose in London Jan 16-23 2002 issue 288
If anyone can make a musical work, it's surely Trevor Nunn, But although his revival of the Rogers and Hammerstein 1949 classic is an enjoyable affair, and despite those unforgettable songs, I still came away with the uneasy feeling that the short story which inspired it (James A Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific) might have been better served had it been turned into a straight play.
Set in the South Pacific islands during WWII, this is not just a love story but a tale of racial tolerance. And it is the sour taste of prejudice which sits uncomfortably with the joyfully optimism of :I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair" and "A Wonderful Guy". That said Lauren Kennedy's blonde Nellie Forbush (a naïve navy nurse from Little Rock) has the voice legs and toothy sex appeal to win over the entire American navy, let alone Philip Quast's solid but smitten French plantation owner, a man with a past (and a rich dramatic voice) who is reluctantly recruited for a dangerous mission by John Shrapnel's Captain Brackett.
Matthew's Bourne's choreography is at it's best in the more exuberant numbers (including the opening "There is Nothing Like A Dame" which gives the sailors a chance to flex their muscles), but less effective in the gentler moments of the love affair between Lt. Cable and Liat, a teenage islander. But the highlight of the show is Sheila Francisco's gleefully opportunistic Bloody Mary, around ball of a woman who can easily out-fleece the troops, but proves powerless against the racism which threatens her matchmaking plans.
South Pacific review by Gareth Gorman 06/02/2002
Making a welcome and overdue return to the London stage, SOUTH PACIFIC, surely, song-wise, Rodgers & Hammerstein's best musical also impresses in its strong and dark storyline.
In the aftermath of the war against terrorism, Trevor Nunn's latest musical overhauling really packs in plenty to think over. Not that this a radical version, it would seem that all that has actually been done is keeping the war and racial themes up in the mix instead of glossing over them by making a big song and dance over the musical aspects.
There's still fun to be had here though. Lester Ellis leading the marines in the stomping Bloody Mary and There Is Nothing Like A Dame, while Sheila Francisco as Bloody Mary gets a turn at giving us a twirl herself with the splendidly silly Happy Talk.
Philip Quast as Emile de Becque effectively makes his own impression on the part, giving him a definite, 'he's his own man' feel whilst also drastically modernising the singing of the role for those of us used to Giorgio Tozzi's (used for Rosanno Brazzi to lip sync to) morphine readings.
Even more likely to catch your eye is Lauren Kennedy who manages to pack all the perkiness, idealism and mistake-making of youth in her own distinct reading of Ensign Nellie Forbush. Why, she'll even stop you from laughing out loud at the subtext of I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair.
If there's one complaint to make, it would be that coming after the lush version of My Fair Lady, the National Theatre Olivier (020 7452 3000) seem far too content to allow the text and performances to deliver all, this time. Props expenditure seems to have consisted of: one jeep, one shower and one fake palm tree. Despite that, this production will leave you feeling Younger Than Springtime and very Bali Ha'I indeed.
Transcript of Interview with Philip on the Nicky Campbell Show, BBC Radio 5, 01 April 2002
NC In rapt attention as we were listening to extraordinary Phil Sutch there, Connie Henry, former athlete and Phil Quast, current singer on stage. "South Pacific" - it's back again! It's great with these classic musicals that they can be tweaked, can't they; little new emphases put in and . . . there's a bit of that, isn't there.
PQ This one was a little different, because I don't think it'll ever be seen again in this form - Trevor Nunn, who directed it, managed to go back and find the old prompt copies and found stuff that was actually cut.
NC Really?
PQ Yes, not only cut because the show was too long, and so it became a union problem in America, but there were lines that were cut which, although the original book it was based on won a Pulitzer Prize, were just too radical for 1949, and too confronting.
NC What, with the racial stereotypes in it, and all that stuff?
PQ Well no, not the racial stereotypes, because the piece is actually against racial stereotyping, it's actually dealing with mixed marriages.
NC Well, when I saw "Happy Talk" . . .
PQ Yeah, but that's the film; it works in a different way in the stage musical. You've got a mother who's pimping her daughter and wants a better life for her, and is trying to get her married off to an American soldier, to go to America. And you've got a girl who falls in love with a man but can't bear the thought that he's actually had sex with a coloured woman. And that's actually on stage and it's . . .
NC Is that all cleaned up for the musical then?
PQ No it's all there . . .
NC But I mean in the film musical.
PQ Yes. Even my character, who on stage has actually killed a fascist with his bare hands - in the film it just says he fought with him and he fell and knocked his head, but in the stage play he actually puts his hands around his throat and strangles him to death.
NC Was it Tennessee Williams's play, "A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", which was cleaned up as well? A lot of cleaning up went on - Paul Newman / Elizabeth Taylor - the Paul Newman character, the root of his problems was because he was gay and couldn't admit it, and obviously the marriage was running into difficulties, or the relationship with Elizabeth Taylor . . . there was a lot of cleaning up going on in Hollywood, wasn't there.
PQ But it still does.
NC Does it?
PQ Yes, it still does. I think there's even been pressure to clean this one up. It's still confronting a lot of it. It's hard to believe when you see it or you're in it that it was written in 1949; you can't believe that someone had that vision of the future. You're dealing with very strong issues.
NC And of course you have to sing "Some Enchanted Evening". We've got the orchestra, we're going to hear you do it in a second, but it's kind of like doing 'To Be Or Not To Be' in Shakespeare, it's such a standard.
PQ Well the difficulty I had was trying to find a way where you're not singing it operatically, because it's very tempting to do it like that, but it's a man who's very shy and very gauche and not experienced with women, and after singing the song he turns round and hasn't even talked about marriage or anything, he suddenly leaps and says 'I will try to make a good life for you and if we have children I might die first, but you can take all our children off to America'; it's quite funny really.
NC Yes. Bang, it just happens. It's great, isn't it.
PQ He can't help it. He just suddenly says . . .
NC Fall in love, like that. You may see a stranger across a crowded room and somehow you know you've known all along.
PQ You know the words!
NC Oscar Hammerstein - one of Oscar's best that one.
**********
A few minutes later, during a 'phone-in taking the theme 'forgetting things' (passports etc.), a British woman living in France calls in. After NC speaks to her, it's back to the studio :
**********
NC You play a Frenchman don't you?
PQ Yes I do, and I'm Australian and I would like to forget our Prime Minister's name!
**********
Following the tedious 'phone-in there then followed an even more tedious studio discussion about the game blackjack and even a demonstration (on the radio!!) - none of which involved PQ. And then :
**********
NC Interesting time to do "South Pacific", isn't it, because it's about American troops waiting for action, isn't it, so there's an issue there.
PQ There's a line I have to say: 'I know what you are against, but what are you for?', when my character won't fight with the Americans. What's to say that it's a better world that they're fighting for? And there's a strange ripple through the audience when that is said, because you have to ask. NC "Some Enchanted Evening".
PQ Oui.
NC Oui.
**********
Then "Some Enchanted Evening" (RNT Cast Recording) starts up and we hear the beautiful first verse. But what's this? The music's fading out already!
**********
NC On the 'phone from Preston we have Anne. Anne, tell us about your enchanted camping holiday.
**********
And that was it. At the very end of the programme :
**********
NC Thank you very much Connie Henry and thank you Philip South Pacific
We would like to thank Gregor Dickson for taking the time to write out the
transcript of the interview and sending it to us.
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