South Pacific @ Chichester Festival Theatre - August 2021

 

The annual pilgrimage to Chichester's summer musical is one of my favourite days of the calendar. It's nearly a 10 hour round trip in a day, but usually worth it for a really brilliant revival in the glorious Festival Theatre.

2020 denied me of my trip, but last weekend I made the journey, to see the wonderful revival of South Pacific. 

Boasting one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's finest scores, South Pacific is lead to perfection with a truly astonishing cast, who really are an embarrassment of riches.
As Ensign Nellie Forbush, Gina Beck delivers a beautifully complex performance of a woman struggling with her inbuilt prejudice. She has the hopeful and joyous sides of Nellie with her glorious, glistening soprano voice, and then emotionally delivers in the climaxes of the two acts. Opposite her as Emile de Becque is the magnificent Julian Ovenden. Ovenden is unquestionably one of our finest musical theatre actors, and it's showcased to perfection here. His voice is like hot chocolate, and his performance of 'This Nearly Was Mine' (centre stage, in a spotlight, stood still), is the definition of a showstopper and the emotional highpoint of the piece.

Joanna Ampil is a different Bloody Mary to anything I've seen before - she's a driven mother wanted the best for her child rather than the usual shouting islander she is sometimes portrayed to be, and it works an absolute treat.  Zack Guest (standing in for Rob Houchen) gives a strong yet subtle performance as Lt Cable, the young man who joins the war and is the one to cut through the racism with the excellent 'You've Got To Be Carefully Taught'.

Chichester's Artistic Director Daniel Evans has produced a production of the highest quality, with performers and creatives at the top of their game. Ann Yee's choreography is gritty and cuts to the heart of the piece right from the start, with the use of Bloody Mary's daughter Liat as the thing to pull the show full circle. Cat Beveridge conducts a wonderful orchestra of 17 (including a harp!) which make this sumptuous score soar to the it's fullest potential. Add in an almost constantly moving revolve, and a set design from Peter McKintosh that continues to surprise at every turn, and you have all the ingredients come together for a first rate revival.

There are conversations that have begun to occur as to whether we should still be putting on productions of musicals that we find to be 'problematic'. Shows like Showboat, Carousel and South Pacific deal with difficult topics and issues like  racism and domestic violence. They are shows that would, in today's society, more than likely not be made. And that presents a wider discussion as to how we present these shows when we want to revive them. 

Regent's Park have revived Carousel this summer, in a radical new setting, arrangement and ending. People are loving it, but I didn't. What they have done with their tampering with the ending is fundamentally change what Carousel is. Being clear, I take nothing away from the performances in this piece - Carly Bawden and Joanna Riding particularly knocked it out of the park (if you'll pardon the pun!) 

However, the creative team obviously aren't happy with the message of the original ending, which honestly is fine. But they have radically changed the final 30 minutes so much that it no longer bears any resemblance to what Rodgers and Hammerstein actually wrote, and the story they were trying to tell. If you're not happy with the ending of a show, to the extent that you want to change it so much... do a different show! 

Going into South Pacific, I was worried what Evans might have done to the piece to address this. What he has cleverly done, is present it in a completely traditional way, as a period piece. It's set firmly in it's original time and location, and whilst you can feel echoes of it's relevance because of the context of political and world movements over the last few years, it's presented in the way it was intended, and thus it works perfectly. 

There's a moment at the end of the first act, where Nellie's ingrained racism is put on full show when she is introduced to Emile's mixed race children. When she reacts horrified at discovering they are the children of the man she loves, over half of the upper middle-aged, middle-class, white audience at Chichester laughed. It was enormously uncomfortable that, 70 years on since the premiere of this masterpiece, audiences are still having reactions like that...

Revivals are the way to my heart, and they don't come much more grandly cast and presented than this. There are a few houses it'd fit nicely into in the West End, if Chichester wanted to line up a transfer...!

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