"South Pacific" at the Guthrie Theater

"Are we just as naive in America, even today, as we stand at the global altar, concurrently rejecting and embracing new faces? In our national mind and on our conscience we can hear the first three notes of South Pacific heralding again and again the foreignness and the familiarity of what we face, the potential and the risk. If music can store energy, it can release it."

Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical South Pacific is undoubtedly a genius musical score and a sweeping romance. But as the above quote from composer Adam Guettel (grandson of Richard Rodgers) indicates, South Pacific is so much more than just a pretty musical, and was truly ahead of its time. It told a story of interracial relationships 20 years before Loving v. Virginia abolished laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The song "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" is a brilliant thesis on racism and prejudice. When asked to remove the song because "it's untimely and it's not what patrons want to hear when they go to a musical," Oscar Hammerstein replied, "That's what the play is about!" Nearly seventy years later, with issues of immigration and prejudice on the daily news and in every political debate, South Pacific's themes of fear of the other vs. embracing and accepting the other are perhaps more relevant than ever. It's a perfect choice, then, to conclude Guthrie Artistic Director Joseph Haj's first season, and he does justice to this beautiful and meaningful classic with this wonderful production.