Let me say that although I did enjoy the 3 hours or so, I didn't feel much more than a pleasant engagement with the musical. It was like going to a matinee of a movie you'll forget in a couple of hours. So I'm mostly going to focus on what were the negative points for me. It wasn't just me though as this performance got only a single curtain call from the audience.
South Pacific has 3 main strands: the budding relationship between Emile de Becque (Jason Howard) and Ensign Nellie Forbush (Carmen Cusack), the affair between Lt. Joseph Cable (Anderson Davis) and a native girl named Liat (Sumie Maeda) engineered by her mother Bloody Mary (Jodi Kimura), and the hurry-up-and-wait lives of Luther Billis (Matthew Saldivar) and the other sailors.
Nellie, a simple girl from Little Rock, Arkansas finds herself charmed by the Gallic sophistication of Emile. Though they had just met, there's a strong attraction between them except for some obstacles. First, their age, though this is essentially glossed over in the play. He is 44 (as Cable would put it, "He can't be in love, he's 44!") and she is in her early 20s. Second, her racial prejudice makes it difficult for her to accept Emile's half-Polynesian children. I find this a bit unfair to Nellie. Yes, she does have trouble with his, in her words, "coloured" kids (or more specifically their deceased mother) but for all of his supposed more liberal stance, let's not forget that he's a French plantation owner during a time (1940s) when France is still laying claim to its colonial territories. Conveniently, no one asked what his workers thought of him. Finally, he has a dark secret. He fled France because he "killed a man". Unfortunately, this twist is so risible that I heard some titters when Howard made his confession: "Nellie ... I keeled a man". Yet there is still a sense of passionate predestination in their romance, though a marriage proposal after 4 weeks may boggle modern minds.
But I could not get down with Cable and Liat. For one thing, they're obviously pushed together by Bloody Mary. Even if she's is Liat's mother, there's too much of a mama-san vibe there. Cable doesn't seem to fight too hard about it though, his supposedly straight-and-narrow upbringing in Philadelphia notwithstanding. Unlike Nellie, a white Southern belle, there's no genteel courtship, fancy dinner parties, or marriage proposal for Liat. It's straight to the sack, or rather grass hut, for her. And if most cultures use the metaphor of the Spring Season for an innocent girl just discovering love (For example, Kudelki's Four Seasons), then what to make of Cable singing "Younger Than Springtime" to Liat? Add the fact that he's probably at least a foot taller and 100 lbs heavier; she barely came up to his ribs and looked to be only as big as one of his leg. All I can say is ... weird psychoses alert!
Jason Howard makes a serviceable Emile, though his sonorous voice with its French accent sounded distractingly like Victor Laszlo from Casablanca. I actually do not like his operatic voice, with its rounded enunciation, applied to these modern songs. Carmen Cusack is a plucky Nellie, a bit self-conscious of her narrow experience but ready to embrace this new wide world. I did not like Jody Kimura's Bloody Mary with her pidgin English and strong asian accent ("You like? You like!"). I don't much find the old "Me love you long time" schtick that amusing. If Emile can speak perfect English but with an accent, so can Mary. Anyway, Bloody Mary can be played Asian, but also Black or Pacific Islander. In the latter cases, if their English aren't perfect, it still wouldn't be in the "Me chinee, Me no dumb" category. So it's a mystery why they went with this caricature. Anderson Davies played Lt. Cable oddly, all wide-legged hero stances and mannerisms.
Ultimately though, a musical has to stand on the strengths of its songs. For an acknowledged classic, I found only 4 songs to be worth listening to: "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught", "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair", "This Nearly Was Mine", and last but best, "Some Enchanted Evening".
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