South Pacific Metronome
By Sedgwick Clark
I attended Sunday’s matinee of South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont with trepidation. I had known the music from the original cast album, starring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, for going on six decades and was worried that I’d be unable to accept anyone else. I never imagined that it would be the conducting that would deep-six this highly praised revival. From the first notes, I leaned forward in disbelief that Richard Rodgers’s gorgeous melodies could be rendered so inexpressively, so metronomically. “They’re just warming up,” I told myself. “They’ll relax when the singers chime in.” But no, this guy—Fred Lassen, by name—compromised everything to the very end.
The two leads, Laura Osnes (Nellie) and Paulo Szot (de Becque), were actually not bad, and struggled valiantly to escape their conductorial straitjacket. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how much better they could have been with a sympathetic leader.
But Bartlett Sher’s direction was offputting too. All of the American characters just seemed angry, especially Billis (Danny Burstein) and Cable (Andrew Samonsky). “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” was misogynistic, not affectionate. A couple of G.I.s ran bare-assed from the shower (but no nurses?) to titters from the audience. Sure, war is hell and bigotry is bad, but R&H aren’t Sondheim or Heggie.
And then there was the amplification. On the credit side, I could understand every word, many of which are smudged by the original cast. On the debit side, the singers must scale themselves to the machine: not too loud, not too soft, and always under control—in other words, with no truly emotional response to the music. Some 30 years ago, one Christmas night, I saw Hello, Dolly with Ethel Merman. She seemed subdued in the first act, but after intermission she stepped in front of the microphones for one of her songs and pinned me to the back of my last-row orchestra seat. Now that’s theater, never to be forgotten.
Also unforgettable is the current Tony-winning revival of Hair, which has energy galore. Amplification may be inimical to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s warm-hearted inspirations, but it’s a necessary element in this great rock score. It’s as unpretentious and true to the original as Sher’s 21st -century view of South Pacific is not.