South Pacific

South Pacific: Lindsey Wilson review

Lyric Stage balances the beautiful with the ugly in Intoxicating South Pacific

As the fifth and final musical of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “big five” that Lyric Stage has produced since 2007, South Pacific is a bang-up finale. The 38-piece orchestra, 33-actor cast and luscious technical aspects make this production as intoxicating as a tropical cocktail — and just as heady.

For all its watercolor sunsets and lovestruck songs, the show also has a dark undercurrent of war and racial fear, and Lyric’s glorious production balances the beautiful with the ugly.

Based on James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, which set designer Michael Yeargan references with scrims filled with typewritten excerpts, the WWII-based musical is also an excellent example of theater used for social change. Interracial relationships play a starring role, and the media storms currently swirling make this 1949 show feel eerily relevant. The song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” sadly, still applies.

Fresh off her acclaimed star turn in Lady In The Dark, Janelle Lutz radiates youthful energy as naive Ensign Nellie Forbush. Lutz makes the cock-eyed optimist from Little Rock goofier than a typical ingenue, and that’s a great choice. Whether she’s doing a playful jig while singing about being in love with a wonderful guy, giving her short red locks a bubbly onstage scrub while trying to forget him or hamming it up in drag during the military base’s Thanksgiving Follies, Lutz is a joy to watch.

And listen to. Her expressive, crystalline voice soars in some of musical theater’s most cherished tunes, along with Christopher Sanders’ rumbling baritone as Emile de Becque. Thoughtfully portraying the French planter who has adopted the island lifestyle, Sanders uses his immense physical attributes to make the tender, small moments with Lutz even more special. “Some Enchanted Evening” might be de Becque’s calling card, but Sanders’ rendition of “This Nearly Was Mine” is a showstopper.

Anthony Fortino, playing young lieutenant Joseph Cable, may still be searching for his acting chops, but in the meantime his rich tenor more than carries the weight. Sonny Franks has a rollicking good time doing anything for a laugh as entrepreneurial Luther Billis, and Sally Soldo — though onstage only briefly during the nearly three-and-a-half-hour musical —is a delight as his native counterpart, Bloody Mary.

Costumes inspired by Catherine Zuber’s original Tony-winning designs and dreamy lighting courtesy of Julie N. Simmons make it easy to feel the tropical breezes. Under the baton of music director Jay Dias, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original orchestrations are lush.

Len Pfluger’s direction doesn’t rush this melodrama, instead letting us linger on the romantic interludes and racially charged confrontations. This is how it feels to experience one of the best from America’s musical theater canon done right.

South Pacific: Arnold Wayne Jones review

Lyric Stage’s South Pacific

There’s a moment at the very beginning of Lyric Stage’s production of South Pacific — when the lights dim and music director Jay Dias picks up his baton and flourishes it at a full orchestra — that you here those first four famous chords from the overture, the opening notes of “Bali Ha’i:” duh-duh-DUH… Crash! It’s all brass and cymbals, and so totally “Broadway” — the rest of the overture’s orchestrations are as warm as a cocoa and blanket — but it also instantaneously transports you mentally to exotic Polynesia. It’s musical theater, as only Rodgers & Hammerstein could do it.

And what a pair they were: Collaborators for only 17 years (the partnership ended when Oscar Hammerstein died, in 1960), they wrote and produced nine stage musicals, a movie musical (State Fair) and one a made for TV (Cinderella, both since adapted for the stage). Their output wouldn’t be so impressive if it weren’t, well, so impressive. In 2015 alone, we have seen excellent large-scale productions in North Texas of Cinderella and The King and I even before Lyric worked it magic with SP, which it has done with the five “big” R&H musicals in recent years (The Sound of Music, Oklahoma, Carousel, King & I). This one, directed and choreographed by Len Pfluger in the style of the recent B’way revival, is just as wonderful as anything else they’ve done.

It would be easy to give much of the credit to the show itself, and lord knows, having Rodgers & Hammerstein on your show is as close to an imprimatur of quality as you can come without getting Consumer Reports involved. But it’s the full-throated abandon with which Lyric Stage produced their season — huge orchestras, original arrangements, large-scale casts and designs — that really makes you feel you’re as good as in New York City … circa 1958. Even real Broadway doesn’t do shows this big anymore, unless they have Disney animals or men bitten by radioactive spiders in the cast.

Set in the Solomon Islands during the war with Japan, South Pacific opened in 1949, less than four years after the end of WWII, and yet the issues it addresses — American Imperialism, racial tension, the “honorableness” of war, etc. — are as well-thought-out and progressive as anything you could find today. (Fully half of R&H’s shows dealt prominently with social justice and racism; Hammerstein was one of the great liberals of the 20th century.) The bigotry reveals itself subtly, shockingly, by hiding (as it often does) in unsuspecting place. When the bubbly bumpkin Nellie Forbush (Janelle Lutz) first utters the words “colored” to describe the biracial heritage of her boyfriend Emil’s (Christopher Sanders) children, it hits you like a fist to the face.

It might not if you didn’t want to root for so many people in the story — not just the relationship between Nellie and Emil, but that between cocky Lt. Cable (Anthony Fortino) and the Tonkinese teenager Liat (Lia Kerkman). Not everyone will end up together. Not every romance is a happy one. War is hell, after all, and love … well, love is often war, too.

You root for them here, especially Nellie, because, honestly, Janelle Lutz is one of the most intoxicatingly effervescent actresses on North Texas stages. When she sings “Wonderful Guy,” she brings the performance more joyful abandon than I’ve ever seen delivered in the role before, filling Carpenter Hall not with her size but with her boundless personality.

If Lutz is all perky fun, Fortino is sexual energy. His Cable is a bit of obnoxious swagger mixed with tenderness and pecs. It’s a good combination. Sonny Franks as Luther Billis and Sally Soldo as Bloody Mary also deliver memorable moments.

The downside of Lyric shows is that their scale also makes their shelf-lives fleeting: It opened last weekend and closes Sunday. That doesn’t give you much time to see it, but see it you should. No one does musical theater better in Texas than Lyric Stage, and nobody ever did musicals better than Rodgers & Hammerstein.

South Pacific: Nancy Churnin review

Janelle Lutz in love with a wonderful role in “South Pacific”

You’d be advised to catch Janelle Lutz while you can.

She stars as Nellie Forbush, the nurse who falls in love “with a wonderful guy,” in South Pacific at Lyric Stage at Irving Arts Center through Sunday. That’s coming right off getting raves for her Liza Elliott in Lady in the Dark at Lyric and Judy Garland in The Boy From Oz at Uptown Players.

After rising quickly to starring roles in the four years she’s been in Dallas, the Hollister, Calif., native has New York City in her sights, perhaps as soon as a year from now. Still, she won’t forget Texas, she says.

“I hope I will be coming back to Dallas for the rest of my life. The theater community here has adopted me, and I feel at home here, which is really awesome and very comforting.”

The 1949 musical closes the company’s 22nd season as the last of Lyric’s productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most famous shows. The team’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical adaptation of James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book tells the story of Nellie and a young lieutenant stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, where encounters with natives force them to confront their prejudices.

In keeping with its commitment to restoring classic musicals with full orchestras, Lyric will feature Jay Dias conducting the 38-piece Lyric Stage orchestra through Robert Russell Bennett’s original Broadway orchestrations. The show features sets by Tony Award winner Michael Yeargan and costumes by Tony winner Catherine Zuber, who won a second Tony this year for her costumes for The King and I.

Lutz, 28, wasn’t sure she was ready to commit to a life in theater when she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in voice performance from John Brown University, a small Christian college in Siloam Springs, Ark. She decided to move to Dallas, where she doesn’t have any family, to see how she’d fare.

The roles came quickly. Her first was as Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility at Stolen Shakespeare Guild in Fort Worth in 2011. She made her professional debut with Lyric Stage as Elsa Schraeder in The Sound of Music in 2013. She’s become a regular at Lyric, performing in Nine, The Human Comedy and Annie Get Your Gun. Her voice, along with the rest of the Lyric cast of The Golden Apple, can be heard on a CD of the show released by PS Classics.

Lutz feels Nellie is the closest role to her personality, and not just because she went to college in the state where Nellie is from, she says.

Lutz, the third of seven children, was home-schooled and identifies with how scared and excited Nellie is about living in a strange new place.

“Like Nellie, I grew up in a small town on a farm. Like Nellie, I wanted to get out there and see the the world and meet people.”

South Pacific: Martha Heimberg review

Lyric Stage’s South Pacific is a thrilling, heart-wrenching trip you won’t want to miss

Irving — From the moment musical director Jay Dias signals the rich 38-piece orchestra to dive into the overture to South Pacific, the opening night audience at Lyric Stage is swept into an evening of melodic romantic songs and earthy humor, set against darkly destructive themes of racial fear and hatred. The 33-member cast, under Len Pfluger’s exquisite direction fills the stage with rich singing, exuberant dancing and compelling acting that carry you to the beaches of another world, and into the midst of GIs serving in World War II.

Lyric Stage’s South Pacific—its fifth full-orchestra revival of the five major Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals—is a thrilling, heart-wrenching trip you won’t want to miss.

The Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musical, based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific, dramatizes not only the romance of the magical setting, but the grief and ugliness of society’s prohibition. Interracial marriage was a crime in America until the law was struck down nearly 50 years ago, but still a criminal act when the show premiered on Broadway in 1949.

Cockeyed optimist Ensign Nellie Forbush (Janelle Lutz), the Army nurse from Little Rock, falls for Emile de Becque (Christopher Sanders), a rich and handsome French planter who has made a good life for himself on this beautiful Polynesian island. Nellie declares to all on the island, “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy” until she learns that the two charming children (Parker Weathersby and Emma Le) she meets at his plantation home are his own, and that their late mother was a Polynesian woman. Suddenly the glorious soaring of two hearts on “Some Enchanted Evening” is in a tailspin.

The parallel love affair between Lt. Joseph Cable (Anthony Fortino) and the native girl Liat (delicately lovely Lia Kerkman) is also threatened. Cable meets the love of his life on the nearby off-limits island. “Bali Ha’i” is celebrated in alluring song by the island entrepreneur Bloody Mary (an earthy, hard-eyed Sally Soldo), a matchmaking mama seeking an American husband for her exquisite daughter. Fortino’s clear tenor voice swells with tenderness in his discovery of love in “Younger than Springtime,” and takes on a rigid steeliness in “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught,” his explanation of how racial prejudice and fear is ingrained at an early age in Princeton graduates and sweet Arkansas girls alike.

At the heart of the show is the overwhelming magnetism that must happen between Emile and Nellie, lovers from two different cultures and generations drawn inevitably together. Lutz’s big-eyed, glowing star-quality has never shone more brightly. She’s funny and sassy as she heads for the shower, shampoo in hand, singing “I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Outa My Hair.” Her Nellie is a bundle of warmth and vibrating joy in all her songs, her crystal voice wrapping deliciously around the love-struck lyrics of “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy.”

In virile baritone Sanders, Lutz has a full-blooded male matinee idol to sing to and sing with. They are love’s characters made flesh as he enfolds her in his arms in the reprise of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Sander’s Emile is a show unto himself in his deeply felt rendering of “This Nearly Was Mine.” As he draws close to the edge of the stage, the big hall becomes as small and intimate as I’ve ever felt it. Swoon, sigh, applaud—in any order.

George Bernard Shaw’s cheeky definition of an American musical as “a kind of play where everybody sings and nobody can sing” has not a shred of reality in this classy production. Everybody can sing—and dance and act. The Thanksgiving Follies is the perfect placing of a hilarious show within the show, when war and love tensions are mounting on the island. One of my favorite moments is Sonny Franks as seaman Luther Billis doing his hesitant bump-and-grind to “Honey Bun” with Nellie and the ensemble.

Michael Yeargan’s original scenic design opens with a huge typed manuscript of the first pages of Michener’s book, and features floor-to-ceiling banks of blinds, filtering the sun-drenched light and reflecting indigenous palm trees. When the blinds are drawn up, the forbidden, magical Bali Ha’i beckons seductively. Both the Tony Award-winning sets and Catherine Zuber’s sexy 40’s costumes were originally designed for the 2008 Broadway revival from Lincoln Center.

The show runs three hours, including a 15-minute intermission, but it flies by all too soon, and you walk out singing “Happy Talk” and thinking about checking on tickets to see it again next weekend.

South Pacific: Dallas Morning News review

A big-voiced cast of more than 30 delivers richly layered feelings of sensuality, hope, sweetness and earthy humor

IRVING — Lyric Stage’s enthralling production of South Pacific opened Friday — the anniversary of the day in 1967 when the Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages in Loving vs. Virginia.

The timing, while coincidental, serves as a reminder of theater’s ability to challenge a conversation. This Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II classic, with a book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, opened in 1949. It takes sharp aim at the prejudice that made love, for some, a crime. Fittingly, it won the Pulitzer Prize, as did the James Michener book upon which it’s based.

Under Len Pfluger’s compelling direction, the freshness of the struggle stings. From the moment Janelle Lutz steps out as Nellie Forbush, the World War II nurse in the South Pacific, her exuberance and good heart charm the audience just as she charms Emile (Christopher Sanders), a French planter on the island.

Visiting Emile’s home, Nellie adores two sweet children (Emma Le and Parker Weathersby), until she discovers Emile is their father and their late mother was Polynesian. As Nellie wrestles with whether she can live with a man who had children with a woman with dark skin, a parallel story unfolds about Lt. Joseph Cable (Anthony Fortino), who falls for a native named Liat (lovely Lia Kerkman).

In a score where every song is a gem, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” blazes like a cautionary anthem. Fortino’s Cable, smart and bitter about why he can’t marry Liat, sings it to Emile, explaining why people like him and Nellie opt for fear.

The singing is glorious. A big-voiced cast of more than 30 delivers richly layered feelings of sensuality, hope, sweetness and earthy humor. Both the vibrant costumes by Tony Award winner Catherine Zuber and sets by Dallas-raised Tony winner Michael Yeargan were originally designed for the 2008 Broadway show. Yeargan’s sets tellingly contrast the expansiveness of sunset on the beach with offices where light, filtered through blinds, suggests humans’ limited vision.

Lutz brings melting joy to “I’m in Love With a Wonderful Guy,” as she twirls giddily in a bathing suit. Sanders’ penetrating baritone grows wrenching in “This Nearly Was Mine.” Sonny Franks gives a piquant stir to Luther Billis, the sailor who often just plays comic relief, with a suggestion of unrequited feelings. Sally Soldo’s Bloody Mary fleshes out the island huckster as a mother who yearns for her daughter’s happiness.

Under Jay Dias’ feeling direction of the lush 38-piece orchestra, the exquisite overture plows the heart in preparation for the story. Interwoven music underscores dramatic scenes to hypnotic effect as haunting reprises of melodies play while characters grapple with choices.

In yet another intriguing coincidence, a Supreme Court case, Obergefell vs. Hodges, which challenges the right of states to ban gay marriage, may be decided later this month. The parallels about making marriage a right for all loving couples seem poignantly apt.