On a deep, uncluttered stage that stretches back to suggest pristine beaches and the boundless Pacific beyond, the young sailors and Seabees encounter a world in which nothing is familiar except themselves. White sailors on one part of the stage, black on another -- the services were still segregated during World War II -- they clamorously note a deficiency in island life from which black and white suffer alike: There aren't any dames. Well, hardly any.
Lincoln Center's rapturous new production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's "South Pacific," which won a passel of Tonys on Sunday night, is, surprisingly, the first Broadway revival of this otherwise much-revived classic. When "South Pacific" first opened in the spring of 1949, the war was still fresh in the memory of all who saw it. The show ran for five years on Broadway, toured every major American city (and many major European ones) and became one of those early long-playing albums that every boomer's parents seemed to own. Along with the rest of the Rodgers and Hammerstein oeuvre, it became a part of Official American Culture, mid-20th-century edition. The culture before rock-and-roll. The culture before the rebellion against Official American Culture.
And then -- though countless boomers knew the songs, and loved the songs, from all those times their parents played the album -- "South Pacific" faded into the mists of memory, much like the wartime service of the men and women it depicted. So reviving "South Pacific" now can seem, at first glance, like yet another act of boomer piety toward their aging parents, whose tenacity and initiative in the 1930s and 1940s created the prosperous, optimistic nation in which their children grew up.
But the emotions that "South Pacific" evokes today aren't simply celebratory. They never were. Lyricist-librettist Hammerstein's career-long concern was what happens when love meets racism. It's a major topic of "Show Boat," his 1927 masterpiece with music by Jerome Kern, in which a woman passing for white and her white husband must leave a showboat to avoid arrest on charges of miscegenation. It's the chief source of the unspoken tension in "The King and I," in whose climactic number the colonial British school mistress and the king of Siam finally touch, and hold each other, to the strains of "Shall We Dance?" Cross-racial love is the very essence of "South Pacific," in which both the leading American characters -- a young Southern nurse, a young Philadelphia Marine -- fall for, respectively, a Frenchman with Polynesian children and a young Tonkinese woman and struggle with how to fit these relationships into their own known worlds.
Hammerstein's lyrics and characters and his characters' emotions were straightforward, bordering on the archetypal (that's how you become part of Official American Culture). But as a librettist -- and it was Hammerstein, more than anyone else, who turned the early-20th-century musical comedy of disconnected songs and dances into the mid-20th-century musical theater in which song, dance and book told a unified tale -- he plopped his simple characters into complex social settings that demanded of them a certain moral pluck if boy was to get girl and the evening's entertainment prove edifying as well.
What's historically specific about "South Pacific" is its liberal moral pluck on issues of race. It followed by two years Branch Rickey's desegregation of baseball and the first state court decision to legalize interracial marriage (in California). It followed by one year President Harry Truman's order to desegregate the armed forces and, prompted by a Hubert Humphrey speech, the Democratic Party's passage of a strong civil rights plank in its platform. For the boomers in the audience, "South Pacific" offers a tableau of our parents, when very young, behaving very well.
But what's deeply moving about this revival for boomers such as myself is less the complexity of its social tensions than the simplicity of its young emotions, both individual and national. Four years after the war, on the cusp of an era of mass prosperity and moral ascendancy that today seems increasingly remote, audiences flocked to the theater to hear nurse Nelly Forbush, archetypal young American, sing that she's a cockeyed optimist, stuck like a dope with a thing called hope. A lyric more at odds with the current American mood -- apprehensive and angry about our self-inflicted wounds, our decline among nations, the instability of our economic lives -- is hard to imagine. Yet here, poignantly young, are our parents, beautiful, brave and believing, before the America they built somehow slipped, or was tossed, away.
More poignant still, the run of the show coincides with the rise of Barack Obama and his youthful legions. The cockeyed optimists are back among us.
This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
