The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild

TNG-CWA, Local 32035

Bernie Harrison Memorial Award for Commentary

J. Wynn Rousuck, The Baltimore Sun
“Show of Tolerance”

SHOW OF TOLERANCE

When it comes to Rodgers and Hammerstein, audiences may be more apt to think of "raindrops on roses" than race relations.

But the theme of race resonates through many of Rodgers and Hammerstein's best-loved shows -- The King and I, Flower Drum Song and, most prominently, South Pacific.

Winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize, South Pacific is experiencing a resurgence of interest. In addition to the 2001 TV movie starring Glenn Close, there's a new British revival directed by Trevor Nunn as well as an American touring production, which opens a one-week run at the Mechanic Theatre tomorrow.

Although musicals have traditionally been considered light entertainment, the use of serious racial themes makes sense. After all, the Broadway musical is one of this country's chief contributions to the arts, and what better theme than race, which is often described as the defining issue in American culture? Race is, in fact, the central theme of the show regarded as the first modern Broadway musical, Show Boat (1927), a landmark work not only because it was the first musical to smoothly blend story and song, but also because it was the first to tackle serious subject matter.

It's hardly coincidental that the libretto of Show Boat is by Oscar Hammerstein II (the score is by Jerome Kern). A lifelong liberal, Hammerstein continued to favor racial themes when he teamed up with composer Richard Rodgers in the early 1940s.

Not that their shows were intended to serve as political propaganda. "They were theater guys. They were not politically motivated people," says Theodore S. Chapin, president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which holds the rights to their work.

But at the same time, Chapin explains, "I think (the theme of race) is something that they were very cognizant of. They lived through a very charged time. All the stories make some reference, some of them make very specific and bold reference, South Pacific very prime among them."

Part of the theme's appeal was that Rodgers and Hammerstein knew a good story when they saw one. "They saw an inherent drama in people being torn by racial issues and people who were different, period," says Geoffrey Block, editor of The Richard Rodgers Reader, scheduled to be published next month, and author of Yale Broadway Masters: Richard Rodgers, due out next year.

Their attitude toward race had a decidedly sentimental streak. "(It's) this idea of love is blind when it comes to culture, race, all kinds of things," Block says. "That's their real thrust -- that love can conquer prejudice."

This may not be deep thinking, but it's far more substantive than the spun sugar often associated with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

They approached racial themes from different angles in each show. In The King and I (1951), a British governess and a chauvinist Siamese king learn mutual respect. In Flower Drum Song (1958) -- a story about assimilation vs. preserving cultural heritage -- they broke ground by hiring a primarily Asian cast on Broadway. Even The Sound of Music (1959) is ultimately about Nazi persecution.

Message of 'South Pacific'

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.

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.

James A. 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. 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. It's ugly, it's untimely, and it's not what patrons want to hear when they go to a musical."

When he shared this suggestion with Hammerstein, the librettist laughed and replied: "That's what the play is about!"

For 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. 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.

The musical as a whole has proved equally controversial. 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."

Only South Africa appears to have successfully outlawed the show. However, here in Baltimore, community activist A. 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. "We got a letter from Rodgers and Hammerstein confirming that (South Pacific) would not play Baltimore," Kaufman says.

As 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. 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.

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. One exception was Harold Clurman, whose New Republic review described the libretto as "honorably liberal and decent throughout."

Pushing the Envelope

Powerful as public reaction to the musical may have been, South Pacific mutes certain elements in Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Working with director and co-librettist Joshua Logan, Hammerstein interwove material from several of Michener's loosely related stories to create a World War II tale that focuses on Little Rock nurse Nellie Forbush's love for sophisticated French planter Emile de Becque and Princeton-educated Lt. Joseph Cable's relationship with a young Tonkinese woman, Liat.

In the musical, Nellie's love for de Becque is nearly derailed when she learns he has two half-Polynesian children. "Colored!" Nellie exclaims in the new London production, which incorporates some material that never made it to Broadway. In Michener's book, her reaction is even stronger; she responds to these children with thoughts of the ugliest epithet applied to American blacks.

Things work out happily ever after for Nellie, de Becque and the children. But the resolution of Cable's predicament is more problematic since he is killed in a dangerous military mission before he can make his feelings known to Liat."(Rodgers and Hammerstein) want to go for a mass audience, so there are limits to how radical and challenging they're going to be," says M.I.T.'s Klein. In other words, though they "clearly felt audiences would accept the notion of a white woman adopting interracial children," they may have believed interracial marriage was pushing the envelope too far. (Though Rodgers returned to the subject of interracial romance in his 1962 musical No Strings, his first show after Hammerstein's death, he again stopped short of marriage.)

The current touring production of South Pacific heightens the stakes by casting African-American actresses in the roles of Liat and her mother, Bloody Mary. "I thought it would help people see that there's still this race issue in America. I wanted to make sure we kept that feeling," says director Scott Faris.

Because Rodgers and Hammerstein rejected a fairy-tale ending for Cable and Liat, a common misconception holds that Cable is killed because he can't conquer his bigotry. But in the original Broadway script, Cable indicates that he will stay with Liat and not return to America: "Yes, sir, if I get out of this thing alive, I'm not going back there! I'm coming here. All I care about is right here. To hell with the rest."

Consulting the stage directions that Hammerstein penciled in his copy of the script, Chapin, of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, says the librettist described Cable's delivery of these lines as: "filled with emotion of discovery and firm in a new determination."

The 2001 TV movie takes Liat's feelings into consideration as well. "(Cable) says, 'If she'll have me.' He goes one step further," says Rodgers scholar Block, a professor of music at the University of Puget Sound.

World of War, Hope

Despite their limitations when it came to portraying intermarriage, Rodgers and Hammerstein were ahead of their time in another respect, according to Klein. They used adoption and the formation of a new family as subtle ways of forecasting global expansion."(South Pacific) is very much a story, explicitly a World War II story, but also a postwar story about expansion into the Pacific," says Klein, whose Cold War Orientalism will also examine Flower Drum Song and The King and I. "These are stories about forging ties between the U.S. and Asia abroad, and integrating Asians into the U.S. as full citizens."

The latter is at the heart of Flower Drum Song, a show that, while ahead of its time in some ways, has also been regarded as so dated that this season's major revival at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum featured a heavily revised book by Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. The playwright's goal for this production, which is expected to open on Broadway next season, has been "to write the show Rodgers and Hammerstein would write if they were around today," Chapin says.

Of course, Hwang also has the advantage of being able to approach this story from a Chinese-American perspective. Still set in San Francisco, the show now centers on a classical Chinese theater that is rapidly transmogrifying into a Western nightclub.

In the end, Chapin explains, the characters learn that "they can neither discard the culture from which they come or adopt some other culture, but they've got to work together."

It's a lesson that's even more topical today, which may be one reason these shows are undergoing a spate of major revivals. "As we are in the later stages of globalization ... we want to tell the same stories," says Klein.

In the wake of Sept. 11, the musicals' timeliness has only increased. South Pacific, in particular, "seems to have some kind of an emotional connection," says Chapin. "It's war and everybody trying to make a future life with war lurking in the background."

Director Faris says that after the terrorist attacks there was "a whole different feeling and importance to doing the show. All of us felt it -- a commitment, right down to the orchestra and the crew."

And indeed, in the midst of America's war on terrorism, there seems to be more urgency than ever in a show with lyrics that ironically proclaim: "You've got to be taught to hate and fear/You've got to be taught from year to year."

© 2002 The Baltimore Sun

The Guild thanks the Baltimore Sun for permission to reproduce this winning entry.

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