South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten (review)

For many younger fans of the American musical, South Pacific may seem like a bit of a relic. To them, the show may be akin to an elderly family member whom you humor at family get-togethers, letting their slightly outdated choice of language and jokes (think, “There is Nothing Like a Dame”) slide because you enjoy their overall charm (evident in classic songs like “Some Enchanted Evening”). However, in recent years South Pacific has been the subject of renewed focus, mainly due to the critical and commercial success of the 2008 Lincoln Center revival directed by Bartlett Sher. In this production, Sher and his cast and crew made the show more sympathetic to contemporary audiences. Lovensheimer’s study thus comes at an ideal moment, as it rides on the coattails of the resurgence of interest in this show, and delves into the qualities that make it so important to the history of the genre.

Lovensheimer’s book is the first in the Broadway Legacies series, published by Oxford University Press. With Geoffrey Block as the series editor, an impressive roster of board members (including Stephen Banfield), and volumes that will focus on figures such as Agnes de Mille and works such as Show Boat, the series is an exciting and much-needed source for musical theater scholarship. Lovensheimer’s work seems an appropriate choice as the flagship title, with its focus on such an iconic yet timely work. The general project of a book on one specific musical should be applauded and emulated, since it allows for nuanced and detailed accounts of a show’s development, and its dramatic, cultural, and musical content. Another recent example of such a focused musical theater study is Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical by Tim Carter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). The next logical step in musical theater scholarship that we can hope for is that publishers and scholars will also devote in-depth musicological explorations of a single musical to examples that fall outside the “Golden Age.”

Lovensheimer describes South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten as “an investigation of the work’s thematic concerns and how they were developed or altered during the creative process” (p. 10). He focuses this investigation on three primary themes. First, he looks at the manner in which Rodgers and Hammerstein fine-honed the show “until its confrontational thematic content was thought acceptable for mainstream Broadway audiences” (p. 7). Second, he accounts for changes made not for “thematic concerns” but rather “dramaturgical purposes,” i.e., changes that contributed to the completion of a well-edited piece of theater (p. 7). Third, he demonstrates that a close examination of the show’s development, and specific instances of its revision, supply “insight into the postwar era in which it was created” (p. 7). In addition to these three themes, throughout the book he also explores issues of “gender, postwar colonialism, and the changing image of U.S. business in the postwar era” (p. 7). Lovensheimer’s broad thematic scope, coupled with his detailed analyses, easily warrant the book length of this project, and make each chapter valuable in its own right.

Before launching into the specific material of South Pacific, Lovensheimer provides a history of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s personal and professional involvement with political issues. This window into the political and ideological beliefs of these two figures constitutes one of the pleasantly surprising elements of the book. For example, the account of Hammerstein’s involvement in the Hollywood League against Nazism (also known as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League), coupled with an analysis of his exploration of race issues in various musicals, results in a more complete and sympathetic vision of the book writer than most readers probably possess.

Lovensheimer dedicates a chapter to the original source material for the show, James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, providing a detailed reading of its characters, setting, and themes, and the problems its formal structure presents to adaptation. With...