Adelaide Festival Theatre. 31 Dec 2013
Thanks John Frost, for giving Adelaide the pleasure of both finishing 2013 with South Pacific and beginning 2014 with it. The blockbuster's VIP opening night show linked the years with its after-party overlooking the clock-ticking general public's free Elder Park New Year's Eve Party. Those who ended the year with South Pacific now are recommending that everyone else lines up and gets to see it.
It's an old show, so tried and tested, so beloved by the public, that the big producers know that, well done, it will reap profits from which new and risky ventures may be launched. This staging goes all out to give it top gloss. It comes via Adelaide-born Frost together with Opera Australia and in association with the Adelaide Festival centre to deliver nothing less than the Lincoln Centre Theatre's Tony Award-winning production.
Of course, it has stars.
But the magic behind the magic is the depth of expertise, the eye for detail, the keenly-rehearsed synchrony. At the first strains of The Overture, it is clear the Adelaide Art Orchestra is in sweetest good note for the show and everything just shimmers along from there until the audience's moist-eyed standing ovation at the end.
The dancers are as divine as the choreography. The entrance of the male corps in high leaps over the rocks is a spectacle of sheer exuberance. The stage swarms with talent and the characters shine through with Mitchel Butel creating one of the best Luther Billises in the business and, interestingly, one Andrew Hondromatidis who just keeps stealing the eye as Stewpot - an actor gifted with "presence" and very fine movement.
The South Pacific island with its American forces base and the hilltop plantation home of Emile De Becque are smoothly and effectively presented through the sets, the backdrop sea seeming to achieve a certain lifelike texture.
This old Rogers and Hammerstein musical is based on James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of love between cultures and the both serious and silly facets of wartime life on a foreign outpost. Poignant quotations from the Michener text are projected onto the Festival Theatre's safety curtain, neatly contextualising the presentation as well as bookending it.
Surprise of the night is Christine Anu's Bloody Mary. Perhaps the first Australian Indigene to play the Tonkinese role, she took over from Kate Ceberano in Brisbane and made Mary her own. Anu's voice is reedier than familiar embodiments and her look is strongly teeth-stained and pop-eyed. She mutes some of the coarse comicry milked by most performers and delivers a Mary of immense tragic proportions. She searches out the depth of desperation of a woman reduced to selling off her teenage daughter. It is performance from the soul.
Lisa McCune is sweet, vulnerable and altogether appealing as Ensign Nelly Forbush. She is accomplished in a broad range of stage skills and has a lovely melodic voice, albeit in the opening scene she is not only overshadowed by stature but overpowered by the volume of her fellow romantic lead, Teddy Tahu Rhodes playing Emile De Becque. Rhodes' is one great big beautiful baritone instrument. Amplification of such operatic abundance is de trops. And while Rhodes assumes a convincingly thick French accent, he is just a bit wooden as an actor.
By the end of the show, however, no one cares. Young tenor Blake Bowen has blown us away as Lieutenant Cable, Bartholomew John has strutted the stuff of navy authority, Celina Yuen has beguiled as sweet Liat, Jeremy Stanford has been handsome as Harbison, the chorines have delighted and the children have charmed.
A torrent of wonderful songs have been expertly performed
