confused by paradise
by Douglas Messerli
Richard Rodgers (music), Oscar
Hammerstein II (lyrics), Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan (book, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A.
Michener) South Pacific / New York,
Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont / the performance I attended was
on May 9, 2008
Whenever I think of the great
Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals other than the early and more energized Oklahoma! (see My Year 2003) I feel slightly claustrophobic, as if their often
sugary, sweet songs and sensibilities had stuck to my skin. Certainly, I
recognize Carousel, South Pacific and The King and I as great musicals, and I’ve watched the movie
versions of these works countless times; but by the time of the megahit The Sound of Music (a musical I endured
for several weeks of rehearsal and performances in the role of Max in high
school) I could scarcely tolerate their work (I have seen the Julie Andrews
movie only twice!); their Chinese-American travesty, Flower Drum Song, seems to me an embarrassment!
From the moment the curtain rises on two beautiful, supposedly
Polynesian-French children singing “Dites-Moi,” the audience perceives that
they have entered another world, a world—intimated, in this production, by the
written passage by original author James Michener upon the scrim—of enormous
beauty and utter strangeness, where an old woman, whom we later discover as
Bloody Mary, attempts to sell the sailors human heads on a ocean beach that
looks out upon a stunningly beautiful volcanic island in the distance. This is,
indeed, an enchanted world, but also
a world of strangers, a “crowded room”—a theater of war—wherein different
cultures encounter one another.
Nelly Forbush is all in a flutter about finding the perfect man (a
cultured Western European), and is even able to accept Emile de Becque’s
explanation of why he is a “murderer”—after all, he killed a “bully.” Yet, it
soon becomes intolerable to her that he has embraced a culture truly foreign to
her, along with a Tonkanese wife, with whom he has produced the two beautiful
children with whom the musical begins!
The whole of American history, I would argue, might be summarized by
various issues relating to our ability to assimilate almost any form of
violence while being absolutely unable to accept any, but the most conventional,
forms of love!
By the second scene, where the all-male chorus, who, unlike the
officers, are trapped in sexual isolation (they are not permitted to fraternize
with the ensigns and the French planters have placed their daughters on
isolated islands) sing their paean to the special and irreplaceable qualities
of the opposite sex, I came to recognize that at the heart of this work is not
sexual longing—albeit something that
is clearly in evidence throughout the musical—as much as the sexual innocence, along with the spiritual and
intellectual innocence the Americans represent.
For the Seabees and Sailors, Bloody Mary—an earth mother perhaps, but a
sad imitation of female beauty (her skin is as tender, we are told, as
"Dimaggio's glove")—is their only available associate (“Bloody Mary
is the girl I love…, now ain’t that too damn bad!). And when they sing of their
sexual longing, the opposite sex is not represented by a full-bodied woman, but
through the American slang word, representing a diminished notion of the sex, a
“dame” (or, contrarily, if one defines the word as do the British, some one of
higher position, and therefore out of their reach).
Nelly, moreover, immediately describes herself as a “hick,” and later
reiterates that she is “corny as Kansas in August,” “normal as blueberry pie,”
that she is a knucklehead, a “cockeyed optimist”—in short out of sorts with the
world in which she has discovered herself. As if we needed further evidence of
separation, actor Kelli O’Hara speaks in a convincing southern twang (the
actress was born in the South) which forces us to realize just how out of place
she and the Americans are in this tropical paradise, how confused they are in
being confined to such a heavenly spot.
These Americans, obviously, are the terrifying innocents of Blake and,
centuries later, of Graham Greene, a folk who, while pretending to embrace the
world, shun everything outside themselves or often destroy or displace what
they cannot comprehend—while sanctimoniously boasting of their malady.
Throughout South Pacific,
however, we get evidence of cracks in that wall of sexual “normality.” In their
isolation, the all-male chorus comes to define the homoerotic nature of much of
Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s musical, a situation underlined in the Lincoln
Center production by Christopher Gattelli’s choreography, wherein several of
his male dancers cavort with each other, posing in positions of the opposite
sex.
Seabee Luther Billis—who beautifully washes and irons Nelly’s clothes
(he’s especially good with the pleats), cleverly weaves native skirts, prefers
the all-male boar’s-tooth ceremony to the other sites of Bali Ha’i (even when
he does embrace a woman, it is during a religious ceremony), and later performs
as Nelly Forbush’s “girlfriend” Honey Bun—is much ridiculed as a representative
of a love that not only cannot speak its name, but in the World War II
atmosphere of the writing, suffers no language with which one could even ask.
The “saxy lieutenant,” Joe Cable, who Bloody Mary picks out for her
beautiful daughter Liat, is also an innocent—so innocent that he cannot even
imagine that Mary might have a daughter, as if Liat were of virgin birth—and,
enveloped in innocence, is only too ready to copulate with the young girl, who,
the story hints, is not even of (American) legal age. He is unable to embrace
the idea, moreover, that in the morality of Tonakese culture such an act might
be understood as a prelude to marriage! He is indeed, as Bloody Mary describes
him "a stingy bastard."
While Nelly tries to convince herself that the irrationality of racism
is somehow natural and innate, Joe recognizes it is something learned, a thing
“carefully taught,” which he expresses in one of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s
most politically aware songs of their career, which for me washes away some of
that sticky residue of their sentimental songs better than Nelly is able to
wash her would-be lover “out of her hair.”
For James Michener and, consequently, Hammerstein and Logan, the only
solution to such a crisis is to follow Papa Hemmingway’s lead and send the male
characters on a hunting expedition, in this case a search for Japanese naval
movements in the neighboring islands. Despite their moral outrage against
racism, the writers sacrifice Joe Cable—if he survives, he, after all, is now
ready to marry Liat—allowing the Frenchman de Becque to return to the wiser
Nelly, ready to forgive him his earlier racial “transgression,” and to embrace
both his children and life.
For all my seeming sarcasm, however, by musical’s end all characters
have the potential for change. Despite the violence around them, love has
altered their lives, and those who return home will hopefully arrive as
figures—like the leading characters of this work—transformed by the culture(s)
they have been forced to face, a fact that could not have been made clearer
than in the Lincoln Center’s production of the penultimate scene, where the
soldiers, gathered in military formation, march off—not to the strains of some
patriotic anthem, as one might expect, but to the quietly chanted lyrics of the
absurd love-song “Honey Bun”:
A hundred
and one pounds of fun,
That’s my
little Honey Bun.
Get a
load of Honey Bun tonight.
New York, May 10, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2008).
