Wednesday’s ice storm kept us from attending the dress for “South Pacific,” still the folks at the Toledo Opera were kind enough to find seats for two for Friday’s opening night show. The Valentine was packed. James M. Norman, Toledo Opera’s general director and director of the musical, said this was the largest audience since before the pandemic, and that, as of curtain time Friday, fewer than 20 seats remained for Sunday’s 2 p.m. matinee. (Visit toledoopera.org for ticket availability.)
Making wonderful use of a few set pieces and projections, the musical drops our winter weather weary souls in the middle of a tropical island where the French plantation owner Emile de Becque’s children played by Mia Snyder and Nico Perez de Tagle cavort and sing a song in French. They scoot off before their father (Keith Phares) arrives with his guest, the Navy nurse Ensign Nellie Forbush (Claire Leyden). Clearly, he’s wooing her, and she’s not discouraging him. Each has their song.
Nellie sings about being “A Cockeyed Optimist” from Little Rock and Emile recounts how on “Some Enchanted Evening” two people can meet. This is a double helping of provisional love songs, those pieces in classic musicals where the two lovers telegraph their future romance.
This takes part on a hillside on an island occupied by the U.S. Navy represented by Seabees, all enlisted men, and the by-the-book officers (Phil Skeldon and Kurt Elfering).
Luther Billis (Robbie Raso) is the Seabees’ ring leader, always looking for an angle to make a little extra money and maybe a little feminine action, as are all his fellow Seabees.
This comes out in “There Is Nothin’ like a Dame.”
A musical would be nothing if guy and dame didn’t hook up. In addition to Emile and Nellie, the musical features another couple Marine Lt. Joe Cable (Mike Schwitter) and Liat (Sarah Rachel Bacani), the daughter of Bloody Mary (Kamryn Loy), an entrepreneurial Tonkinese woman, who relishes having the Americans around so she can sell them souvenirs.
But both romantic couples are troubled by the prejudices the Americans carried with them from home. Nellie breaks off hers because Emile has mixed-race children by his first wife a Polynesian woman, and Cable can’t imagine bringing Liat home as his wife to his upper-crust family in Philadelphia.
He and Emile hash out the roots of bigotry in “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”
As familiar as this show is it’s wonderful to see it live on stage. There’s a vigor to the performance that belies its age — “South Pacific” made its debut 75 years ago. As opera companies reach out for new audiences and community theaters turn their gazes to more contemporary fare, these shows from the classic era of American musicals will more and more take their places along side the work of Puccini, Bizet, Gounod, and other classical composers.
As Toledo Opera’s “South Pacific” demonstrates, they will be in good hands.
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