thedrifter
04-03-08, 11:13 AM
James Brady On Media
Enchanted Evenings
James Brady, 04.03.08, 6:00 AM ET
Once, many years ago, there was a good war. A war that was forced on us and not begun on a misguided whim, but a war we literally had to win. It was really a terrible and bloody war, but "good," too--such a good war that they made a Broadway musical about it, harnessing the combined talents of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Josh Logan, Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, and it ran for years (officially for 1,925 performances, at the time second only to long-running "Oklahoma!") and later became a movie.
It was called "South Pacific," and Thursday night at Lincoln Center, it returns in a full-blown revival, the first on Broadway for half a century. I have no idea whether this production and cast will be worthy of the material, but I've already bought four tickets so that my grandchildren can see it as I did the original while still in college in 1949.
The writer who conceived the idea was the late James Michener, who served in the actual South Pacific and got a wonderful little and best-selling book of short stories out of what was really a hideous war against the Japanese lasting from Pearl Harbor in late 1941 into 1945 and their surrender.
His stories brought vividly to life the wartime adventures of lonely sailors on lonely rocks, combat Marines, colorful pilots, perky American nurses far from home, native island beauties, mysterious remittance men and French planters, hustling Seabees and secret missions, naval battles and jungle rot, boar's tooth ceremonies and dancing girls and endless boredom punctuated by tragedy and loss. When you put rich material like that into the hands of geniuses like Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, you get a show with legs.
Now that it's back, I got out the liner notes of the original cast album (the Sony Classical CD) with Martin and operatic basso Pinza and the great Juanita Hall as "Bloody Mary."
The show first opened April 7, 1949, at the Majestic Theatre following the greatest advance ticket sale in Broadway history and a successful tryout in New Haven, Conn. The casting was interesting. As nurse Nellie Forbush, a young "hick from Little Rock," the composers signed a popular Broadway "belter," Mary Martin, who sang the hit song "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in a 1938 Cole Porter musical and by now was 36. As the French planter Emile de Becque, Rodgers and Hammerstein went further afield. Pinza had just retired from the Metropolitan Opera and his agent out in Hollywood was having no luck lining up jobs for the aging singer. But for Oscar and Dick and "South Pacific," Ezio was perfect.
Especially on those nights he worked. As Rodgers later said sourly, "He basked in the adulation bestowed on him as a middle-aged matinee idol ... but he could never be counted on to show up for performances. The minute his contract was up he was on a plane for Hollywood, where he made two of the deadliest bombs ever released."
No matter. The critics raved. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called it "magnificent ... as lively, warm, fresh and beautiful as we had all hoped it would be." In the Herald Tribune, Howard Barnes wrote, "novel in text and treatment, rich in dramatic substance and eloquent in song." The show earned eight Tony Awards and the next year's Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The play also brought controversy when tackling racial intolerance in the song "Carefully Taught," as the doomed Marine lieutenant Joe Cable of Philadelphia falls for and then dumps his native girl Liat, "Bloody Mary's" daughter, on the grounds of "What would they think back on the Main Line?" Michener later recalled the guts authors Rodgers and Hammerstein demonstrated when they refused to cut the controversial song, even if it threatened the show's existence.
Years later when I was doing interviews for WCBS-TV in New York, Jim Michener showed up flogging his latest book, and we got to talk about "South Pacific" and all this on the air. And then off the air in the green room we recalled the week he once spent in January 1952 up in the North Korean mountains with the 2nd battalion, 7th Marines, where he took plenty of notes but never got a novel out of the experience, as he had in writing of airmen in Sayonara and The Bridges at Toko-ri.
Michener's response was something along the lines of, "There was no back-story to what you guys did, no girls, no love story, no raucous liberty, no intrigues or rivalries to illuminate a novel that would work. All you Marines ever did was fight."
Not a bad eulogy, I thought. And I hope, for his sake and for Hammerstein and Rodgers, and for the millions of Americans who fought there, that "South Pacific" continues to give us more "enchanted evenings."
Ellie
Enchanted Evenings
James Brady, 04.03.08, 6:00 AM ET
Once, many years ago, there was a good war. A war that was forced on us and not begun on a misguided whim, but a war we literally had to win. It was really a terrible and bloody war, but "good," too--such a good war that they made a Broadway musical about it, harnessing the combined talents of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Josh Logan, Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, and it ran for years (officially for 1,925 performances, at the time second only to long-running "Oklahoma!") and later became a movie.
It was called "South Pacific," and Thursday night at Lincoln Center, it returns in a full-blown revival, the first on Broadway for half a century. I have no idea whether this production and cast will be worthy of the material, but I've already bought four tickets so that my grandchildren can see it as I did the original while still in college in 1949.
The writer who conceived the idea was the late James Michener, who served in the actual South Pacific and got a wonderful little and best-selling book of short stories out of what was really a hideous war against the Japanese lasting from Pearl Harbor in late 1941 into 1945 and their surrender.
His stories brought vividly to life the wartime adventures of lonely sailors on lonely rocks, combat Marines, colorful pilots, perky American nurses far from home, native island beauties, mysterious remittance men and French planters, hustling Seabees and secret missions, naval battles and jungle rot, boar's tooth ceremonies and dancing girls and endless boredom punctuated by tragedy and loss. When you put rich material like that into the hands of geniuses like Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, you get a show with legs.
Now that it's back, I got out the liner notes of the original cast album (the Sony Classical CD) with Martin and operatic basso Pinza and the great Juanita Hall as "Bloody Mary."
The show first opened April 7, 1949, at the Majestic Theatre following the greatest advance ticket sale in Broadway history and a successful tryout in New Haven, Conn. The casting was interesting. As nurse Nellie Forbush, a young "hick from Little Rock," the composers signed a popular Broadway "belter," Mary Martin, who sang the hit song "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in a 1938 Cole Porter musical and by now was 36. As the French planter Emile de Becque, Rodgers and Hammerstein went further afield. Pinza had just retired from the Metropolitan Opera and his agent out in Hollywood was having no luck lining up jobs for the aging singer. But for Oscar and Dick and "South Pacific," Ezio was perfect.
Especially on those nights he worked. As Rodgers later said sourly, "He basked in the adulation bestowed on him as a middle-aged matinee idol ... but he could never be counted on to show up for performances. The minute his contract was up he was on a plane for Hollywood, where he made two of the deadliest bombs ever released."
No matter. The critics raved. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called it "magnificent ... as lively, warm, fresh and beautiful as we had all hoped it would be." In the Herald Tribune, Howard Barnes wrote, "novel in text and treatment, rich in dramatic substance and eloquent in song." The show earned eight Tony Awards and the next year's Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The play also brought controversy when tackling racial intolerance in the song "Carefully Taught," as the doomed Marine lieutenant Joe Cable of Philadelphia falls for and then dumps his native girl Liat, "Bloody Mary's" daughter, on the grounds of "What would they think back on the Main Line?" Michener later recalled the guts authors Rodgers and Hammerstein demonstrated when they refused to cut the controversial song, even if it threatened the show's existence.
Years later when I was doing interviews for WCBS-TV in New York, Jim Michener showed up flogging his latest book, and we got to talk about "South Pacific" and all this on the air. And then off the air in the green room we recalled the week he once spent in January 1952 up in the North Korean mountains with the 2nd battalion, 7th Marines, where he took plenty of notes but never got a novel out of the experience, as he had in writing of airmen in Sayonara and The Bridges at Toko-ri.
Michener's response was something along the lines of, "There was no back-story to what you guys did, no girls, no love story, no raucous liberty, no intrigues or rivalries to illuminate a novel that would work. All you Marines ever did was fight."
Not a bad eulogy, I thought. And I hope, for his sake and for Hammerstein and Rodgers, and for the millions of Americans who fought there, that "South Pacific" continues to give us more "enchanted evenings."
Ellie