Maltz finds thoroughly modern themes in classic ‘South Pacific’
To complete its 15th season, in the final slot just as the renewal notices are mailed out, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre reaches back almost 70 years for a genuine musical theater classic, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “South Pacific.”
Many of the Maltz theatergoers who have seen the show previously will be expecting a nostalgia trip, but for director Gordon Greenberg (“Barnum”) and his cast, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical is relevant and resonant to contemporary life.
“The surprise to everyone – the thing that shouldn’t be a surprise – is why this show is still as strong at it was 70 years ago,” says Greenberg. “Why it’s still around and being produced at the level it is. It’s because of its amazing strength and depth and sheer joy on every level, even when it’s expressing difficult to grapple with subject matter. Just hearing the poetry of the lyrics is fascinating, but the big thing when you’re inside of it is approaching it like
it’s happening right now.”
Nicholas Rodriguez, who will play Emile de Becque, the French plantation owner who falls in love with Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, says it’s more than just the role. “Sure, they’re great songs to sing – but there’s also some really juicy things you get to say out loud. I can’t wait to hear how they hang over a modern audience. The same issues of race that people were dealing with post-war are still current.”
Based on a couple of James Michener’s World War II “Tales of the South Pacific” stories, which also won a Pulitzer, the 1949 show takes place on a Pacific island, far from combat and far from dames, much to the chagrin of the Seabee sailors. Like many Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, it focuses on two love stories – Forbush and de Becque, a widower with two small Polynesian children, and a secondary couple with even more extreme backgrounds, Ivy League-educated Lt. Joseph Cable and a young Tonkinese woman named Liat.
“Doing ‘South Pacific’ is like taking on a Shakespeare play. Equally robust and equally nuanced and rich,” says Greenberg. “And this is as much a play as it is a musical. There are so many deep values and ideas within it.”
Perhaps, but when the score includes such popular songs as “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Younger than Springtime,” “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” and “Bali Ha’i,” the audience probably enters ready to hum along.
“It’s very easy to be seduced by these beautiful melodies and the associations they have for us,” says Greenberg. “But when you get under the skin of these characters, and really think why they’re expressing these thoughts at these moments, it becomes electric.”
Playing Nellie is a bucket list dream for New York veteran Erin Davie, featured last season in the Broadway revival of “Sunday in the Park with George.” As she says of self-described “hick from the sticks” Nellie, “It’s one of those iconic roles that any girl in musical theater wants to play at some point. It’s just one of the best written roles around. And it’s Rodgers and Hammerstein.”
“She has one of the most beautiful voices on Broadway,” Greenberg says of Davie. “And I knew Erin was an equally good actor as much as she is a singer. Both Erin and Nick have the ability to make us hear the material as if for the first time. As if it were written yesterday. And they both have great wells of soul and humanity and vulnerability. That’s ultimately why you go to the theater.”
Rodriguez, last seen locally at the Kravis Center as Captain von Trapp in the national tour of “The Sound of Music,” has appeared in “South Pacific” twice already as Lt. Cable. As he says of de Becque, the role he now graduates to play, “It’s been a long time that this man, who is in the prime of his life, is living in this transient world. And there’s this war going on that’s not his war. These sailors and nurses and officers come and go, but I think he’s quite lonely.”
Nellie comes into his life, he says, but “he does not know how long she’s going to even be there. She could be deployed somewhere else or, God forbid, get killed. So he wants to seize on this amazing opportunity and there’s this boyishness that comes out of him that nobody else would see but her.”
In contrast is Nellie, who has “been very sheltered. She hasn’t seen a lot of the world. During the course of this show, she kind of loses some of her innocence. Her eyes are opened,” says Davie. “She has to make a decision if she’s going to stay the way she was and be like the people back home or follow her heart and do what she feels is right. She’s just figuring life stuff out, and you get to see it happen.”
From a performer’s viewpoint, a Rodgers and Hammerstein song is “perfectly crafted,” Davie feels. “They’ve thought out every word and phrase exactly. And there’s no melodies like Rodgers’.”
“And there’s no word painting either,” adds Rodriguez of Hammerstein’s lyrics. “Because they’ve lived on for so long, you also have the obligation of the audience’s expectation. You have to acknowledge that and present your own version of that. That’s the best compliment, when someone comes up to you afterwards and says, ‘Oh, I never heard that lyric before.’ Even if they heard it 57 times, or their parents took them to see Mary Martin in 1949. It like you’re allowing yourself to visit an old friend.”
“This is my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein show, by far,” says Greenberg. “Its structure, its tone, the poetry in the lyrics, the music is obviously soaring and heartlifting. But the story itself, the narrative, is so strong and so resonant.”
And at the Maltz, he adds, “There’s a glorious 13-piece orchestra, a glorious set by Paul Depoo. This whole production is so rich and sumptuous and transporting, so full of entertainment value and soulfulness and humanity.”