![]() A final radio broadcast breaks off as Emile is being attacked, and we don't know whether he has survived. Another two weeks go by, in which Emile and Cable are successful in the mission, although Cable is killed. When Emile enters, Nellie asks Cable to explain their American prejudices in "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught." (This was a point of some controversy in that era and Rodgers and Hammerstein were pressured to delete the number, but refused.) Emile sings of what he has lost in "This Nearly Was Mine" and now agrees to join Cable on the desperate mission. Afterwards she and Cable discuss their confused feelings. During the Thanksgiving show, Nellie does a routine dressed as a sailor singing about "his" girlfriend "Honey Bun" - Billis dressed in a grass skirt and coconut bra. Bloody Mary makes her sly case for marriage in the song "Happy Talk," but Cable succumbs to his own prejudices and refuses. Emile arrives, looking for Nellie, and Bloody Mary comes in with Liat, looking for Cable. The second act begins two weeks later, amid preparations for a Thanksgiving show at the base. Nellie's prejudices overwhelm her and she rushes out as Act I ends. With the project delayed, Cable is swayed by Billis to requisition a boat and take them to Bali Ha'i, where he meets Bloody Mary's daughter Liat and falls in love, singing "Younger Than Springtime." On the other island, Nellie attends a party at Emile's house, after which he introduces her to his children, whom she had not realized were his. Nellie has been thinking about Emile and decides "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair." As soon as she sees him again, however, she is convinced that Emile is "A Wonderful Guy." Now that he has something to live for, Emile turns down the American request to go on the mission. Cable asks Nellie about Emile, and whether Emile might accompany him on his mission. He is diverted by Billis and Bloody Mary, who lure him with the temptations of "Bali Ha'i," a nearby but off-limits island. Joseph Cable enters the scene with a dangerous secret mission to set up an observation post on a Japanese-occupied island. sailors and Marines sing "Bloody Mary," saluting the local woman who sells native crafts for "fo' dolla'," and lament the absence of women in "There Is Nothing Like a Dame." Lt. Nellie sings a personal philosophy, "A Cockeyed Optimist," and then Nellie and Emile sing of their blossoming love in "Twin Soliloquies." Emile urges her to seize the moment in "Some Enchanted Evening."Īt a navy base on the island, bored U.S. The overture, a dramatic arrangement of the show's main numbers, begins with three of the most famous notes in American musical theater, the opening phrase of the song "Bali Ha'i." The two children of the widower Emile and his deceased Polynesian wife are playing on the terrace of Emile's house and sing "Dites-Moi." They are hustled off by a servant as their father and Nellie, a nurse he has met, approach. It takes place around 1942, on an unspecified island in the South Pacific. Joseph Cable and the Tonkinese girl Liat and the competing/conspiring hustlers Bloody Mary (Liat's mother) and Billis. Navy nurse Ensign Nellie Forbush and French planter Emile de Becque the young lovers Marine Lt. The result was a show about three interconnected couples: the older lovers U.S. For comic relief, they took the character of the Seabee conman Luther Billis from the story "A Boar's Tooth." (Relationships and interaction between Americans and various native and colonial characters are at the core of most of Michener's stories.) Rodgers and Hammerstein, however, decided that this would seem too similar to Madama Butterfly, and made the "Fo' Dolla'" line subsidiary to another romance found in "Our Heroine," about a Southern nurse who falls in love with a French plantation owner. The original plan was to base the new musical on the story "Fo' Dolla'," about a romance between a young island girl and a stuffy American officer. Soon it became a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, with Logan as both director and co-librettist and Hayward joining the producing team of Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan. The team of producer Leland Hayward and director Joshua Logan first had the idea of turning the book into a musical, and it was Logan who brought the idea to Richard Rodgers. ![]() Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, a collection of related World War II short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948.
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