![]() ![]() Powerful as public reaction to the musical may have been, South Pacific mutes certain elements in Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. One exception was Harold Clurman, whose New Republic review described the libretto as "honorably liberal and decent throughout." ![]() Most of the original New York reviews, however, focused on the richness of the overall show and the glorious songs, instead of the political content. Reviewing the production in The Evening Sun, Gilbert Kanour commented on the theme of "potential miscegenation" as well as the "social conscience" of one of the characters. "We got a letter from Rodgers and Hammerstein confirming that would not play Baltimore," Kaufman says.Īs a result, the show didn't reach Baltimore until the fifth and final year of its first national tour - 1955, by which time Ford's was integrated. Robert Kaufman recalls that local civil rights workers won the support of Rodgers and Hammerstein when they asked the producers to boycott the city's former Ford's Theatre, which had segregated seating. However, here in Baltimore, community activist A. Only South Africa appears to have successfully outlawed the show. After the initial touring production played Atlanta in 1953, some Georgia legislators introduced legislation aimed at banning entertainment with "an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow." The musical as a whole has proved equally controversial. As an example, Klein cites a Boston headmaster who kept the lyrics under glass on his desktop for inspiration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when black students were bused into his predominantly white school. When he shared this suggestion with Hammerstein, the librettist laughed and replied: "That's what the play is about!"įor years the song served as a kind of anthem for civil rights activists, as Christina Klein, an associate professor of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in her forthcoming book, Cold War Orientalism. It's ugly, it's untimely, and it's not what patrons want to hear when they go to a musical." The morning after South Pacific's New Haven, Conn., tryout, Michener wrote that "some agitated New Englanders" warned him: "Your play will fail if you keep in that song about racial prejudice. Michener, author of Tales of the South Pacific, the book on which the musical is based, included a telling anecdote in his memoir, The World is My Home. Over the years, reaction to one of the show's songs, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught," has been indicative of the strength of the show's anti-racism message. ![]() Nowhere was Rodgers and Hammerstein's stance against racism more pronounced than in South Pacific, a show in which two couples grapple with prejudice during wartime. ![]()
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