South Pacific

(Lincoln Center Theater, 4 August 2009)

The South Pacific island is the America of the past, a country of competing prejudices and of detachment by force (of irreversible immigration), which morphs into the America of the future, a country of competing ideas and of detachment by choice. Laura Osnes (as Nellie Forbush) is beautiful and understatedly sincere. Loretta Ables Sayre's character (Bloody Mary) says that she will master English in no time, and one believes, convinced by her skilful singing, a hobby practised when not selling straw skirts and dried human heads. The actors' shared skill is in endowing their characters with more traits than are necessitated by their lines and with lives extending beyond the play.