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Guess I’ll do some musical reviews too after reading the Rent review sadd3j and teewee made. I’m definitely piling up on the number of Playbill programs I have =), but this will be another way of keeping track of what I’ve saw. Oh and I decided to be a season subscriber to one of the musical theaters here too ;).

I went to see a touring, revival production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific last night. Rodgers and Hammerstein are definitely the classical Broadway masters – the “Andrew Lloyd Webber of the ’50s”, to help paint the picture. Rodgers is the composer and Hammerstein is the lyricist, and they collaborated on a whole bunch of musicals including Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, Carousel, The King and I and of course, South Pacific. Random trivia bit: Richard Rodgers is one of 2 people in the world that has an EGOT + Pulitzer prize =P.
Anyhow… South Pacific is a very classical broadway show I would say. The music is very complete but classically styled – a lot of reprises of themes, which makes it very well rounded. Amazing baritone lead with his French accent and the soprano lead is fairly decent. There’s a surprising amount of French dialogue in the show – one of those instances that I’m glad I got a Canadian education, where at least I could understand enough of what they’re saying to catch the gist of what’s happening. Otherwise, the story was very flat – nothing dramatic like Rent or Wicked (granted it is a little unfair to compare to my 5 star musical selections), and people just fall in love at first sight – not a lot of character development. There’s also a very unexpected theme of racial prejudice that shows up in the second act regarding interracial marriage. My initial thoughts were since South Pacific is an older musical from the ’50s, maybe segregation is still a big issue back then and hence the characters made a big deal out of interracial marriage – but on further thought, that seems to be something we (especially as Asians) still struggle with nowadays.
The musical is just shy of 3 hours long with intermission, which is quite lengthy, especially when the plot isn’t moving. 3 stars for me.