South Pacific by Joshua Logan

First published: 1949

First produced: 1949, at the Majestic Theatre, New York City

Type of plot: Musical; war

Time of work: World War II

Locale: Two islands in the South Pacific

Principal Characters:

• Ensign Nellie Forbush, a U.S. Navy nurse
• Emile de Becque, a French planter
• Lieutenant Joseph Cable, a young Marine
• Bloody Mary, a Tonkinese entrepreneur
• Liat, Bloody Mary’s daughter
• Luther Billis, a Seabee
• Captain George Brackett, a naval commander of the island
• Commander William Harbison, Captain Brackett’s executive officer
• Ngana, and
• Jerome, Emile de Becque’s young children

The Play

A two-act musical play containing twelve scenes in each act, South Pacific is set during World War II on an unnamed Pacific island and the nearby island Bali Ha’i. The curtain opens on Emile de Becque’s plantation home, revealing Ngana, age about eleven, and Jerome, age about eight, his children of European and Asian descent. Emile de Becque is entertaining Nellie Forbush, an attractive Navy nurse much younger than he, at his home for the first time. The children have left the stage before Emile and Nellie enter. She will not learn of the children’s existence for a while and will not learn until later still that they belong to Emile. The lovers met at a dinner at the Officers’ Club and were instantly attracted to each other. Many years earlier, Emile fled France after killing the village bully. Nellie fled her small-town life in Little Rock, Arkansas, by joining the Navy. However, their differences in age and background furnish the central conflict in the play. Their age differences are exacerbated when Nellie finally learns that Emile lived for a long period with a “native” woman, now dead, and fathered two children by her.

The conflict between Nellie and Emile is mirrored by a subplot featuring Marine Lieutenant Joseph Cable, a well-to-do native of Philadelphia and Princeton graduate, and Liat, a Tonkinese girl of perhaps seventeen. Liat’s mother is Bloody Mary, a coarse crone, who earns a nice living selling grass skirts, boar’s teeth, and spurious shrunken heads (oranges painted with shoe polish) to American servicemen. Bloody Mary encourages the young couple to rendezvous on Bali Ha’i, a nearby island viewed as extremely exotic by the Americans because it is the site of the ceremony of the boar’s tooth (and because, rumor has it, the French planters have hidden their young women there). Despite the fact that Liat speaks no English, she and Cable fall in love. He eventually breaks off their affair, however, concluding that a future life together is an impossible dream. This is a decision he comes bitterly to regret.

Captain Brackett and Commander Harbison, who head up naval operations on the island, earlier attempted to recruit Emile for a dangerous mission to Marie Louise Island, a place the Frenchman knows very well. Their plan calls for Emile to act as Cable’s guide. From there, Emile and Cable would spy on Japanese shipping and would direct American aircraft to enemy targets by radio. After initially declining, Emile agrees to go once Nellie rejects him. Cable is also eager to risk his life after his own rejection—for what he has come to believe is no good reason—of Liat. Emile and Cable are transported by seaplane and submarine to Marie Louise Island, where they do excellent work and are responsible for derailing several lines of Japanese shipping. During Emile’s absence, Nellie realizes that her love for him is all that matters and that her reservations were small-minded and silly. Sadly, Cable is wounded during the mission and dies three days later.

The play’s dramatic and occasionally grim action is lightened throughout by the antics of Luther Billis, an irrepressible Seabee (a member of the Navy Construction Battalion). Billis flouts authority, competes with Bloody Mary in the grass skirt and shrunken head business, and gets into one outrageous scrape after another.

In the final scenes of the play, the men and some of the nurses undertake a mass exodus from the island, no longer a backwater locale in the war. The tide of battle has turned, Operation Alligator is under way, and the Americans are on the move. Nellie remains behind with the island hospital. As the play ends, Nellie and Emile are reunited on the terrace of his home, where act 1, scene 1 began. The play concludes with the same song that introduced it, and there are fifteen musical numbers throughout.

Dramatic Devices

The collaborative creation of South Pacific illustrates well the differences between drama and prose fiction. The dramatic version of South Pacific was created by several people: Michener wrote the work of fiction, Hammerstein and Logan wrote the book (the text of the play), Richard Rodgers wrote the music, and Hammerstein wrote the lyrics. Logan coproduced and directed the play. In his musical collaborations with Rodgers, Hammerstein typically wrote the words first, although the effort always was to integrate words and music into a single expression. Prior to the 1920’s, the American custom in musical theater had been to borrow the music from outside sources and fit lyrics to the score.

South Pacific skillfully combines comedy with the development of a serious theme, but it is, foremost, a musical play. No musical, despite what other elements it might possess, can succeed if its music is unmemorable. Fortunately, South Pacific contains some of the most memorable songs in the history of musical theater, including “Some Enchanted Evening,” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” “Bali Ha’i,” and “Younger than Springtime,” among others. The staging is elaborate, imaginatively using lighting and a transparent curtain to represent twenty-four separate scenes on two different islands. The cast is huge: thirty-five speaking parts and additional singers and dancers.

One bit of stage business has become legendary. In act 1, while Nellie sings “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair,” the actor playing the part, Mary Martin, actually shampooed her hair onstage in every one of the roughly two thousand Broadway performances.

Critical Context

South Pacific played almost as long on Broadway as Oklahoma! (1943), one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s earlier plays. South Pacific won the Drama Critics Circle Award for best musical play of 1948-1949 and nine Tony Awards. Within three years of its opening in New York, the play was produced in London, Australia, and Sweden. A successful motion-picture version was released in 1958.

In 1942, Rodgers and Hammerstein began a successful collaboration that ended only with Hammerstein’s death in 1960. Together they wrote the hit musicals The King and I (pr. 1951), Flower Drum Song (pr. 1958), and The Sound of Music (pr. 1959). Beginning in 1949, Rodgers and Hammerstein acted as theatrical producers for their own works as well as for the works of others. They also formed Williamson Music, a music publishing firm. The collaborators combined bright tunes with more sophisticated stories than had been previously employed in musical comedy. This blend was widely imitated, however, following their successes. From the beginning of his career, Hammerstein followed the tradition of the light operas of Sir W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, wherein the words were written first and the music was composed to reflect the character and the situation.

Joshua Logan, the other creator of the play, also had a distinguished theatrical career both before and after South Pacific. He directed Annie Get Your Gun (pr. 1946) and cowrote and directed Mister Roberts (pr. 1948), both highly successful Broadway plays. He directed many other popular plays, as well as several major motion pictures: Bus Stop (1956), Sayonara (1957), Fanny (1961), Camelot (1967), and Paint Your Wagon (1969). Logan directed South Pacific again in 1958, when the play was adapted as a motion picture.

Sources for Further Study

Block, Geoffrey Holden. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Green, Stanley. Broadway Musicals: Show by Show. 3d ed. Milwaukee, Wis.: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1990.

Green, Stanley, ed. Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book: A Record of Their Works Together and with Other Collaborators. New York: Lynn Farnol Group, 1980.

Hischak, Thomas S. Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim. New York: Praeger, 1991.

Logan, Joshua. Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life. New York: Delacorte, 1976.

Michener, James A. The World Is My Home: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1992.