David Román

South Pacific (review)

When Rodgers and Hammerstein premiered South Pacific, in a landmark 1949 production starring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, critics and audiences praised the musical for its original songs, charismatic casting, and historical relevancy. South Pacific went on to win nine Tony Awards including Best Musical, and it was awarded the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The musical introduced several songs that are now standards of the American songbook including “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Younger than Springtime,” and “A Wonderful Guy.” Based on selected stories from James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Tales of the South Pacific, the musical responded directly to World War II; it resonated with audiences to such a degree that it ran on Broadway for nearly five years. Surprisingly, the current production at Lincoln Center, superbly helmed by Bartlett Sher, is its first Broadway revival.

American Songbook (review)

American circus workers. Only an unmarked lamppost now stands there. On the video screen, the audience sees Lemon cross a Duluth street toward the lamppost, and engage in small, spontaneous movements underneath it. The film ends, and a strange wooden automated table moves onstage and collapses. In a voiceover, James Baldwin notes, “this is an act of sympathy.” The stage clears. Ralph Lemon steps into a wide plastic box upstage. The music roars, and another dancer enters onstage with a hose and trains it on Lemon. Lemon reels from the force of the water, falls, rises up, falls, dances, falls, fights, falls. Suddenly the piece breaks open as a re-enactment of the resistance by black high school students to police intimidation in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1964—a counter-memorial to the site that Lemon had shown earlier in video. Lemon “dances” this iconic turning-point image of the Civil Rights era as the lights come up on the audience. The other dancers enter onstage and begin to dance—the same dance of resistance, defeat, and perseverance they have been performing throughout. Only now, the force they oppose becomes clear: the violence of the police fire-hoses, but also the violence of forgetting. The lights on the audience seem to ask: “Has there been violence here? In America’s, Minnesota’s, ambivalent remembering, what are the burdens that must be borne?” In one of the last gestures of the piece, a dancer briefly lays his head on another’s belly. It’s one of the few instances of physical contact, and for a moment it transfigures the violence of the ending into tenderness. Ralph Lemon gives James Baldwin the last words, about the “very real presence of Africa” in the world: “the center of the earth has shifted and the definition of man is shifting with it.” Come home Charley Patton seems both a call for and counter-memorial to Baldwin’s optimism. It is one of the most moving experiences I have ever had in a theatre.