(Both the Broadway and film versions soften Emile’s status to that of a widower with two offspring, both irresistibly cute little tykes.) Michener’s book explores Joe’s story much more deeply than Nellie’s Rodgers and Hammerstein reverse the emphasis. In one, a Marine lieutenant, Joe Cable (played by John Kerr in the film), falls desperately in love with a Polynesian woman, Liat (France Nuyen), but discovers he cannot bring himself to marry her due to her race in another, Nellie Forbush (Mitzi Gaynor), a navy nurse from Arkansas, falls in love with a French planter, Emile de Becque (Rossano Brazzi), but is then shocked and repelled to discover Emile has a number of mixed-race adult children by Polynesian women. Rodgers and Hammerstein were drawn to two stories in Tales of the South Pacific and turned them into intertwining plotlines. While it does not possess a uniting theme, a recurrent motif is the way its characters are wrenched from their everyday lives, forcing them to confront inner struggles and limitations they likely could have avoided but for the war. Navy veteran’s travels throughout the South Pacific as what he called “a kind of superclerk for the naval air forces” during World War II. Structured as a collection of loosely-related short stories, the book serves as a reflection of the U.S. Rodgers and Hammerstein based their production on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (1947) by James A. Many of its songs have become instantly familiar classics: the bawdy “There is Nothing Like a Dame,” the giddy “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” and the passionate “Some Enchanted Evening.” But the weakest of its tunes, artistically, is also the most politically powerful, and points toward one of the notable ironies of the American experience during World War II. A film adaptation by director Joshua Logan in 1958 brought the show to an even larger audience, cementing South Pacific’s status as one of the greatest musicals ever. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific opened on Broadway in 1949 to immediate acclaim and racked up 1,925 sold-out performances before closing in January 1954. What Was South Pacific's Legacy on Race? Close
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