South Pacific Lincoln Center

South Pacific revival gets mixed reviews

The London revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific has opened to mixed reviews from critics.

The Lincoln Center Theatre production set during World War II stars former EastEnders actress Samantha Womack and Brazilian opera singer Paulo Szot.

The Telegraph called the show a "continuous pleasure" and praised its "vivid and fresh" performances.

However The Independent described it as "a highly accomplished, but faintly bland and traditional treatment".

Known for its songs including I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair and There is Nothing Like a Dame, the production won seven Tony awards when it ran for two years at New York's Lincoln Center.

But The Independent's Paul Taylor said in his three-star review the Barbican show "insufficiently" lived up to expectation.

"Unfortunately, there's next to no sexual chemistry between the two leading performers," he wrote.

"That's symptomatic of a production that seems to have lost something in crossing the Atlantic and is deficient in that spark that turns respect into rapture."

The Telegraph's Charles Spencer said: "Though not quite as lavish as the original Lincoln Center production, this touring version with beautiful South Sea island designs and a fine 25-piece pit orchestra making the most of the brilliant score, still proves a moving and uplifting experience."

He praised Szot, who also starred in the Broadway production, saying he "brings charm, authority and a sense of Gallic melancholy" to plantation owner Emile de Becque, while Womack was a "delightfully engaging" nurse Nellie.

Meanwhile Michael Billington of The Guardian said it made for a "pleasant evening", but added "because only two of the original cast have made the journey [from the US production], it is a little hard to see why New Yorkers got so excited".

Samantha Womack “a revelation” in slick 'South Pacific' revival ...

, Richard Rodgers’ 1927 collaboration with Jerome Kern) tackles racism. Often the argument is that these issues are not met head on – but how could they if they wanted their musical to reach the Broadway stage in the middle of the twentieth century? Of course they have made these works ripe for revisionism and deconstruction but sometimes – as in Bartlett Sher’s very successful Lincoln Centre revival that has now reached the Barbican Theatre – playing things fairly straight can mostly work too. It remains a curiosity that until this staging, South Pacific performance before but know most of the songs for various reasons; especially from the 1986 recording with Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras and ‘There Is Nothing Like A Dame’ as performed in the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show! Songs that are now regarded as ‘standards’ pepper a flimsy plot derived from James A Michener’s ‘Tales of the South Pacific’  which he based on his own service in World War II – its opening words form the front cloth that we see. The musical itself shows Americans at their bravest best but also their xenophobic worst and Bartlett Sher might want us to ponder how much anything might have really improved  for his nation from this point of view, despite its African-American President.