South Pacific (musical)
South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific. The issue of racial prejudice is candidly explored throughout the musical, most controversially in the lieutenant’s song, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”
About South Pacific (musical) in brief
South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. The issue of racial prejudice is candidly explored throughout the musical, most controversially in the lieutenant’s song, \”You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught\”. The production won ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Libretto, and it is the only musical production to win Tony Awards in all four acting categories. Its original cast album was the bestselling record of the 1940s, and other recordings of the show have also been popular. The show has enjoyed many successful revivals and tours, spawning a 1958 film and television adaptations. The 2008 Broadway revival, a critical success, ran for 996 performances and won seven Tonys, including best Musical Revival. The piece won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950. Especially in the Southern U.S., its racial theme provoked controversy, for which its authors were unapologetic. The first and final stories are thematically linked in the tenth and tenth battle, so the last story is titled \”The Huga Point Cemetery at Huga Huga.’” The stories are all about American military operation to dislodge the Japanese from a nearby island.
Each story stands independently, but revolves around an American militaryoperation to dislodge the Japanese, dubbed Alligator, in preparation for the eighteenth battle, dubbed The Landing at Kuralei. Many of the characters die in that battle, and the last of the stories is titled “The Landing at Alligator”. The story is about an American nurse stationed on a South Pacific island during World War II, who falls in love with a middle-aged expatriate French plantation owner but struggles to accept his mixed-race children. A secondary romance, between a U. S. Marine lieutenant and a young Tonkinese woman, explores his fears of the social consequences should he marry his Asian sweetheart. After they signed Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin as the leads, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote several of the songs with the particular talents of their stars in mind. The original Broadway production enjoyed immense critical and box-office success, became the second-longest running Broadway musical to that point and has remained popular ever since. The story was collected into Tales of South Pacific, which won Micheners a 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is now considered one of the most popular musicals of the 20th century, along with The Sound of Music and Annie Get Your Gun. It has been performed more than 1,000 times on Broadway, and has had a number of successful tours and revivals, including a 2008 revival that won seven Tony Awards.
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This page is based on the article South Pacific (musical) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 20, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
