SOUTH PACIFIC – Masterworks Complete Recording (Jay Records CDJAY2 1470).
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Original cast albums are not always complete recordings of a musical show, due to the rules governing recording times. Some numbers are often abbreviated or simply omitted because of the pressures of covering a score on a single disc. This has happened many times since the recording of musicals began in the late 1940s. Luckily JAY Records is able to include every last note of a score for their Masterworks DigiMIX complete recordings series. Here we have the full account of the show including all the orchestral music, the dance music and the extended bridges between scenes and the underscoring music within the individual numbers for South Pacific.
Following on from Oklahoma! in 1943, Carousel in 1945 and Allegro in 1947, the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II continued with South Pacific in 1949. The show was based on Tales of the South Pacific, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by James A Michener, from which Hammerstein and co-writer and director Joshua Logan took a story about American nurse Nellie Forbush, stationed on an island in the South Pacific during the Second World War. She falls in love with expatriate French plantation owner Emile De Becque, who has his own family of mixed race children.
Another strand of the plot concerns US Marine Joe Cable and his love for Liat, a young Tonkinese woman. So there are two possible controversies at play here in an unusual state of affairs for musicals of the time, although Oklahoma!, Carousel and Allegro had already broken the mould of what were until then mostly musical comedies rather than musical dramas. The nurse, Ensign Nellie Forbush, has to overcome her possible social prejudices against De Becque’s children, while the problem of miscegenation comes between Joe the Marine and the local girl Liat. Another difference is that the main love story is centred around a woman and an older man, Nellie and Emile, rather than that of the younger couple, Joe and Liat.
However, whatever the first audiences thought of the plot and the characters, the New York production of South Pacific was an enormous hit with the public as well as the critics. Opening in April 1949 and running initially for nearly 2,000 performances, the demand for tickets was so great the production had to transfer from the Majestic Theatre in June 1953 to a bigger theatre, the Broadway, and by the time it closed in January 1954 it was the second longest-running musical in New York, after Oklahoma!
Apart from the attraction of Rodgers’ brilliant music and the joyous lyrics of Hammerstein, it was obvious that the audience wanted to see the star Mary Martin as Nellie Forbush and her co-star, lyric bass singer Ezio Pinza, who was only cast because the show he was about to do at the time, Mr Ambassador, had not been written! It turned out to be a great stroke of luck as Martin and Pinza made an ideal couple. Other casting included Juanita Hall as Bloody Mary, William Tabbert as Joe Cable and Betta St John as Liat.
The resulting show won five Tony Awards plus a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. After Broadway South Pacific toured the US and opened in London in 1951, since when there have been many revivals, and of course the film version was also an enormous success too, opening in the US as a roadshow presentation in March 1958. In the UK the film ran for over four years at the Dominion Theatre in London before going on general release.
And so we come to the latest and most complete recording of South Pacific from JAY Records. It is not a recording of a staged performance but one in which most of the singers had already appeared in productions of the show during their careers. For example, Justino Diaz sang the role of Emile De Becque with the New York City Opera; Paige O’Hara had sung Nellie Forbush in a 1993 production in Australia; Sean McDermott appeared as Joe Cable in The Pace Company’s touring production in 1987; and Pat Suzuki was Bloody Mary in the 1994 production from Long Beach Light Opera.
Listening to this double-album CD reminds one how wonderful Rodgers’ score sounds in the orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett, the legendary composer and arranger, who specialised in the music of Broadway and Hollywood including the works of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Rodgers. Bennett had already worked with Rodgers on Oklahoma! and the television series of Victory at Sea.
The music for South Pacific has a very lush, almost symphonic, sound especially here as played by the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Owen Edwards. It opens with a grand medley overture of the hit tunes from the show – ‘Bali Hi’, ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’, ‘A Wonderful Guy’ and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, the last surely being the most romantic song ever penned, with Rodgers’ surging melody that later becomes the big song to accompany Hammerstein’s faultless lyrics.
South Pacific covers a panoply of moods and emotions, a very satisfactory mix of drama and comedy. As Nellie Paige O’Hara delivers her numbers with great aplomb, from the semi-comic ‘A Cockeyed Optimist’ and ‘Honey Bun’ to the regret of ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair’, something that she really doesn’t believe. Later on she breaks out with her real feelings as she announces that she is in love with ‘A Wonderful Guy’. Paige O’Hara captures perfectly her changing moods with excellent vocal ease.
Justino Diaz has a deep rich voice that brings a certain sort of majesty to the role of Emile De Becque. He presents a powerful reading of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, the recurring motif throughout the show. On the subject of prejudice he shares a song with Sean McDermott as Joe Cable, ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’ because when it comes to the problems of age difference (between Nellie and Emile) or racism (Joe’s love for Liat) those feelings are not inborn, they are influenced by other people’s prejudices. These problems are reiterated later in the show as Diaz sings very movingly about what Emile has lost in ‘This Nearly Was Mine’, another of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s classic numbers that pushes the plot forwards without needing dialogue to explain the situation.
Joe has a duet with Bloody Mary, a purveyor of goods and other things, in ‘Mary and Lootellan’. As Mary Pat Suzuki presents a very playful performance as she wants Joe to go to that special island of Bali Ha’i where all the local girls are including her daughter Liat. Eventually one of the sailors, Luther Billis (Brian Greene) persuades him to go to Bali Ha’i where Mary encourages her daughter Liat to meet Joe and make what she calls ‘Happy Talk’, another of the most memorable numbers to come out of South Pacific which Pat Suzuki makes all her own in a delightfully gentle performance. Sean McDermott as Joe is in fine voice for ‘Younger Than Springtime’, another of the show’s outstanding and sumptuously romantic songs.
Of course it is not all doom and gloom for the residents of South Pacific. Apart from the humour in some of the songs already mentioned, there is of course the famous show-stopping number of ‘There is Nothin’ Like a Dame’ in which the company of sailors sing the praises of the one thing of which they feel deprived. In performance it always brings the house down and Morecambe and Wise didn’t do it any harm in their famous Christmas show in which all the BBC presenters sang and danced their way through this most appealing of choral numbers.
With a cast of nearly 40 this double DigiMIX CD must be the definitive version ever committed to the recording studio. It even includes a charming song, ‘My Girl Back Home’, which was cut from the original score where it preceded Joe singing ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’. Here Sean McDermott and Paige O’Hara perform it delightfully well, making one wonder why it was cut in the first place. However, it was included in the film version as a duet for Nellie and Joe.
Michael Darvell
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