When I was growing up, most musicals didn’t come to Glasgow on tour. I still managed to see a few – in fact the shows I saw as a kid in Glasgow shaped my love of musicals in to what it is today, but recently the amount of popular musicals coming to Glasgow has increased dramatically. All of a sudden, us Glaswegians don’t have to go to Edinburgh just to see a show!
Most recently I attended South Pacific at the Theatre Royal on the 17th of November. South Pacific is a popular Rodgers and Hammerstein musical set on an island in, you guessed it, the South Pacific! It’s World War II and young U.S. Navy nurse, Nellie Forbush, played by Eastenders actress Samantha Womack, has fallen in love with a middle-aged French plantation owner Emile De Becque, played by Paulo Szot, despite only having known him for a few weeks. The main plotline of the musical follows their relationship as well as bringing in subplots focusing on some of the minor characters such as the U.S. Seabees eagerness to visit the nearby island of Bali Ha’i which is off limits and Lieutenant Joseph Cable’s relationship with a Tonkinese girl from the island.
The production had transferred from Broadway after winning multiple Tony awards and opened at London’s Barbican Centre on the 24th of August 2011 before beginning its UK tour in October. The production is very well designed with lots of oceanic back drops, palm trees and slatted blinds that drop down to give the audience a sense of difference between being outside and being inside. Samantha Womack was good but not as spectacular as I had expected, singing and dancing well enough but lacking the emotion needed for the difficult situations her character finds herself in. Paulo Szot had transferred from Broadway alongside the production but I found his thick accent and deep, operatic baritone hard to understand at times. However I may be alone in this opinion since he won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for his performanceas Emile – one of the three most coveted theatre awards! The star of the show is without a doubt, Loretta Ables Sayre as Bloody Mary – a street vendor who enjoys some good flirty banter with the boys on the island. Her large personality brings a much needed spark of life to the show since Womack often appears subdued when she isn’t washing men out of her hair and proclaiming that she’s ‘as corny as Kansas in August’.
The enchanting score cannot be argued with however and timeless classics such as “Some Enchanted Evening” fill the theatre with so much emotion that audiences rush to see this show just for the songs. Having never seen South Pacific before, I was surprised by how many of the songs I was familiar with already. My favourite numbers were “There is Nothin’ Like a Dame” sang by the sailors when complaining about the lack of woman on the island and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” sang by Nellie and the nurses which has been part of my singing in the shower playlist for years now.
Overall I found the plot a bit dry, some of the subplots had very little relevance to the main storyline apart from to increase the idea of the racial issues in that kind of community. I found myself switching off during the dialogue but paying attention during the songs – especially the fast numbers. Most recently I’ve been going to see more modern musicals so maybe the fact that this musical was originally written in 1949 gave it a bit of a different feel to some of the newer ones. It’s always a joy being able to experience a show in my home city, something I’ve done a lot of in the past few months I must say, but the atmosphere is never the same as in a London show. At South Pacific the audience talked through the overture (a terrible crime in my opinion – it’s my favourite part), there was an outbreak of coughing over the opening dialogue which made it very difficult to hear the actors on stage, the average audience age was about 75 and someone’s zimmer frame fell over during the second act making a loud clatter and then, finally, people began to exit the theatre before the cast had even taken their bows which I think is extremely rude and disrespectful and just as bad as talking through the overture! I do wonder if this is due to the specific audience that would go to see South Pacific as I experienced none of these problems during the last show I saw at the Theatre Royal. However that audience would probably have been younger and the show (Legally Blonde the Musical – a must see by the way) was a much more modern and upbeat show than South Pacific.
I think I might enjoy South Pacific more if I’d seen it in London or on Broadway as the atmosphere in the theatre really had an impact on me. I don’t know if it is very well suited to regional theatres where I feel the bigger the show, the better the show. Obviously a lot of people love South Pacific so it’s going to sell tickets but I definitely enjoyed it much less than anything else I’ve ever seen on tour. My next stop on my South Pacific journey is to watch the 1958 film of the musical. I’d never been interested in watching it before but now it’s definitely on my list. Make it on yours too; I think it’ll be worth it.
