When South Pacific first opened in 1949, the critics found the lyrics to “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught”,

” You’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late,

Before you are six, or seven, or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate…”                      to be too obvious and preaching. 

That would have been in New York.  However, when the show toured Georgia in the South, in 1953, a couple of state legislators tried to ban it, on the grounds that it had, “an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow.” 

More recent productions have been nervous about how to stage Nellie Forbush’s initial shock that Emile de Becque has been married to a Tonkinese woman, as Nellie mistakes the father of the children to be his manservant Henry (Shailan Gohil). 

What Daniel Evans’s production does at Chichester is to firmly set the musical South Pacific in its historical context, in the 1940s, some twenty years before some of the Southern states of America condoned mixed race marriages.  No-one is saying this was right.  It was wrong.  But it was what happened then.  See another musical Show Boat. 

Daniel Evans’s production is a triumph!  From the opening overture performed as a ballet by the lone figure of Liat (Sera Maehara) to the parade of the US Marines on the circular stage we know we are in an island in the South Seas, invaded by the American military. 

The sets are special.  We switch to Frenchman Emile de Becque (Julian Ovenden)’s plantation villa with its bouganvillea covered terrace where the children play and sing “Dites Moi”.  Emile is entertaining an American nurse, Nellie Forbush (Gina Beck).   She explains her background as a hic in “Cock-eyed Optimist”  and asks him, whether like most planters, he is running away from a scandal. 

Hugely romantic, his voice soars with the song “Some Enchanted Evening” with no crowded room in sight.  Leaving this romantic bubble, we find the island entrepreneur Bloody Mary (Joanna Ampil) selling grass skirts to the SeaBees, or a shrunken head, probably borrowed from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.  

The men explain what they are lacking on this idyllic island in the rousing “There is Nothing Like a Dame” choreographed with stunts and humour.  Bloody Mary answers with her mystical song about the island Bali Ha’I where rumour has it that the French planters have stowed their women.  The Seabee businessman, Luther Billis (Keir Charles) needs an officer to hire a boat to get to the island and fortunately new arrival, Princeton graduate, Lieutenant Joseph Cable (Rob Houchen) might help.  Cable sings about his girl back home. 

We are introduced to the US Army nurses who run through the audience in khaki uniform with matching khaki face masks.  The nurses in wonderfully accurate 1940s period swimwear take showers on the beach in makeshift shower cubicles, wire coat hangers to work the shower heads, drift wood stalls and grass matting panels for discretion in another design coup from Peter McKintosh.  Luther’s laundry supplies the towels.

As Nellie and the Ensigns sing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” de Becque calls and we have a reprise of “Some Enchanted Evening” and Nellie obviously didn’t use the right shampoo because her next song is “I’m in Love With a Wonderful Guy.”