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Younger than Springtime: William Tabbert and Betta St. John played Marine Lt. Joseph Cable and his islander sweetheart Liat in the 1949 production; below, Matthew Morrison and Li Jun Li take on those parts in the Lincoln Center revival. Courtesy the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization
All Things Considered, April 3, 2008 · One of the most popular musicals of all time — Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific — gets its very first Broadway revival tonight. It’s been close to 60 years since the show opened, but the cast and creative team of the new production say they find South Pacific as resonant as ever.
And that’s a tall order: When South Pacific opened on April 7, 1949, its World War II story and setting had a torn-from-the- headlines feeling.
“Every single person that night in April knew someone who had been in World War II,” says musical-theater historian Larry Maslon. “Every second person must’ve known someone who was in the South Pacific in World War II — and I would imagine at least every fourth person knew someone who died in World War II. And that’s very potent, I think, for an audience.”
Of course South Pacific had more than topicality going for it. Inside a candy wrapper of romance, comedy and exoticism, the creators — composer Richard Rodgers, lyricist and co-author Oscar Hammerstein and director and co-author Joshua Logan — presented a story that questioned core American values, with an emphasis on issues of race and power.
“I was always moved by this group of American artists in the ’40s encountering this first major experience of American military power overseas and what it did to people,” says director Bartlett Sher, who’s in charge of the new Lincoln Center revival. “You know, what happens when somebody from Philadelphia and somebody from Arkansas get dropped into this new world, and they have to question everything about who they are and everything about who they think they were and what they believe.”

npr.org