Hendrik Hertzberg has an excellent post up on his blog about his experience seeing the current production of South Pacific. He's responding in part to a similarly wonderful piece by Frank Rich about the same production. Both authors are quite reverential to the play, but it's their respective musings on its relevance to the cultural moment that I find particularly interesting...since many things on Broadway don't exactly fulfill that standard.

Hertzberg writes:

My parents and most of their politically radical, culturally snooty friends, who were in their twenties or early thirties when Pearl Harbor put the class struggle on the back burner, used to dismiss Rogers and Hammerstein as purveyors of cornball populism. They preferred the tangy, gin-flavored sophistication of Rogers and Hart. A Greatest Generation friend of mine, who not only saw Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in the original 1949 version but also was himself stationed in the South Pacific during the Second World War, wrinkled his nose a little when I told him how much I had loved the revival. “Sentimental slop,” he said.

I can well believe that the show seemed treacly a mere four years after the war, when every person in the audience, at a minimum, knew someone who had been killed or wounded. Its earnest homilies about race must have seemed a little watery, too. The American armed forces had been rigidly segregated throughout the war; the ink on President Truman’s executive order reversing that had barely dried when “South Pacific” opened. Yet the show handled the issue with the softest of kid gloves. The sailors on stage were all safely white. The pro-tolerance message (“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” i.e., to hate)—was left to be carried by two button-cute, half-Polynesian-half-European children whose existence causes Ensign Nellie Forbush, the sweet blonde Navy nurse from Little Rock, to turn away from the émigré French planter she has fallen in love with.

Yet a few subtle tweaks, plus the passage of time, have rendered the Lincoln Center version treacle-free. The production emphasizes the story’s darker edges (which only makes its exhuberant moments more so). The Brazilian baritone Paul Szot makes Emile de Becque, the French planter, into a sort of Albert Camus of the palms. (Szot avoids the blowzy histrionics of Pinza and Brazzi.) The character of Bloody Mary, a chubby middle-aged Polynesian souvenir seller whose daughter figures as the love interest of a young Marine, is played by a veteran Hawaiian lounge singer named Loretta Ables Sayre, and she is brilliant. In the 1958 movie (and, I assume, in the Broadway original), Bloody Mary is a concerned but clueless mom; Ables Sayre plays her as wheedling and angry, a mother who pimps her daughter even as she loves her. And in this “South Pacific” the racism isn’t portrayed only by Aesopian indirection: there are black American sailors on this stage, and they are off to one side, segregated.

And Rich, echoing similar themes:

The Lincoln Center revival of this old chestnut is surely the most unexpected cultural sensation the city has experienced in a while. In 2008, when 80-plus percent of Americans believe their country is in a ditch, there wouldn’t seem to be a big market for a show whose heroine, the Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, is a self-described “cockeyed optimist” who sings of being “as corny as Kansas in August"

Yet last week one man stood outside the theater with a stack of $100 bills offering $1,000 for a $120 ticket. Inside, audiences start to tear up as soon as they hear the overture, even before they meet the men and women stationed in the remote islands of the New Hebrides. Among those who’ve been enraptured by this “South Pacific” the most common refrain is, “I couldn’t stop myself — I was sobbing”...

Though it contains a romance, “South Pacific” is not at all romantic about war. The troops are variously bored, randy, juvenile and conniving. They are not prone to jingoistic posturing. When American officers try to recruit Emile de Becque, a worldly French expatriate, in a dangerous reconnaissance operation, they tell him he must do so because “we’re against the Japs.” De Becque, who is the show’s hero, snaps at them: “I know what you’re against. What are you for?” No one bothers to answer his question. The men have been given a job to do, and they do it...

Watching “South Pacific” now, we’re forced to contemplate Iraq, which we’re otherwise pretty skilled at avoiding. Most of us don’t have family over there. Most of us long ago decided the war was a mistake and tuned out. Most of us have stopped listening to the president who ginned it up. This month, in case you missed it, he told an interviewer that he had made the ultimate sacrifice of giving up golf for the war’s duration because “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf.”

“South Pacific” reminds us that those whose memory we honor tomorrow — including those who served in Vietnam — are always at the mercy of the leaders who send them into battle. It increases our admiration for the selflessness of Americans fighting in Iraq. They, unlike their counterparts in World War II, do their duty despite answering to a commander in chief who has been both reckless and narcissistic. You can’t watch “South Pacific” without meditating on their sacrifices for this blunderer, whose wife last year claimed that “no one suffers more” over Iraq than she and her husband do.