Ruth Leon recommends…South Pacific – Chichester Festival Theatre

South Pacific – Chichester Festival Theatre
Click here for tickets  : from £10.00

August 4, 9, 14, 18, 21, 26, 31, and September 3

Everyone I know who has seen the current production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, directed by Daniel Evans, at Chichester Festival Theatre has said wonderful things about it. Now we can all see it.​

It is set during WW2 in 1943, on an island in the South Pacific, where a unit of American troops are restlessly waiting for the war to reach them. The show’s leading characters, mostly young Americans with no experience of people of other races and nationalities, have to wrestle with inter-racial romance, intolerance, attraction of opposites and fear of the enemy and the ‘other’. It’s a truly great show, certainly a greater show than it was thought to be in 1949, although it was a huge success then, winning the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize and becoming one of Broadway’s longest running hit shows.

This week, to my great delight, it will start streaming internationally which means that those of us who can’t get to Chichester this summer or who would prefer to see it online can just sit back, relax, pour a glass of champagne and, if the spirit moves us, sing along with some of the greatest songs ever written for the musical theatre. Songs such as Some Enchanted Evening, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair and Bali Ha’i. You don’t even have to know all the lyrics although they’re worth knowing and quite astonishingly prescient for 1949 in a world just emerging from a terrible war.

This Chichester production has a terrific cast. It includes Julian Ovenden as Emile, (a plantation owner with a mysterious past), Gina Beck as Nellie (a young Navy nurse who falls in love with him), Joanna Ampil as Bloody Mary (a local entrepreneur), Keir Charles as Luther Billis (a sailor who will exploit any opportunity), Rob Houchen as Cable (a young Navy pilot), and Sera Maehara as Liat (the local girl he falls in love with).

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