SOUTH PACIFIC THE BOSTONN OPERA HOUSE

I woke up yesterday morning fighting off a detached retina. Of course, I didn’t know it yet, but those flashing lights I noticed  in my peripheral vision while I was sitting in the movie theater, wasn’t the result of some idiot texting during the film (that’s another blog). So I reported this phenomenon to my eye doctor and he says– you could be on the verge of a detached retina– and if that happens, you only have 24 hours to fix it! Thus I end up at the office of a specialist– a gorgeous Asian doctor. My powers of observation yet undimmed, I notice she is wearing really slinky polka-dotted Via Spiga slingbacks. She observes that my retina is hanging on– for now. Little did I know, that was not the only impending disaster of the day; that night– pupils dilated and looking like a vampire– I headed for The Opera House and SOUTH PACIFIC.

I should have guessed from the first scene– dead on arrival. There was Ensign Nelly Forbush (Katie Reid) with just enough perk and pizazz to  make us dream about someone like Mary Martin. And her French lover Emile de Becque (Marcelo Guzzo) suggested a creepy cross between Bela Lugosi and Ricardo Montalban. She may have been as corny as Kansas in August, but he was as flat as a pancake in autumn. Together they failed to fill up the Opera House stage, either with their voices– serviceable and never more– or with clever  staging. They either stood still or wandered aimlessly around the cavernous set, oceans of Pacific between them, and not a lifeboat of direction in sight.

Then suddenly, a horrible stench. Someone’s deodorant  had either given up or been  forgotten entirely. The odor had only subliminally registered, when all of a sudden it billowed like an angry cloud out of… of… where?? I mean, I know it’s hot in the South Pacific, but had the director made some weird olfactory choice and given us the hyper-realist version of Nelly and a bunch of sweaty sailors in the tropics? No.  Perhaps the person next to me? That seat was empty. In front of me? I leaned in. Behind me? I dared not look; but the smell was unmistakeable– good old fashioned BO– and it was nearby.  Onstage, Nelly was washing that man right out of her hair, and I wished she’d been able to redirect the shower.

The ensemble chugged along, the familiar songs intact, but never delivered in a way that made them ring true.  In scenes unshaped and adrift, the actors were either a step ahead of each other, or a beat behind. When Marine Lt. Joe Cable (Shane Donovan) first sets eyes on the lovely young Tonkinese Liat (the lovely young Hannah Bautista), he reacts like a wooden soldier out of the Nutcracker. When minutes later they are fully engaged in passionate lovemaking, and he’s singing the beautiful “Younger Than Springtime,” I just didn’t buy it.

At intermission, everyone in my row fled, never to return. Was it the play? The …aroma?? I took a different seat across the aisle and noted that by the time Act II had commenced, half my former row was empty –save for one woman– and she was not the culprit. As for the show, South Pacific is a stretch. It must have been controversial in its time, having taken on the issue of interracial marriage very directly; it asks the right questions about the conventional vs. the exotic. But it’s up to the actors, the staging, the director, the songs to fill in and flesh out what’s implied so that we buy these improbable sea-changes in attitude. This cast and crew instead, laid bare what was missing and delivered this treasure trove of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs as if they were military exercises. There was no life, no nuance, no drama. If only my retina had detached sooner.

And by the way– as I left the theater, I looked across the aisle and noticed that the lone woman who had staunchly held out against the odoriferous onslaught, had long fled. This was no enchanted evening; in fact, the evening stunk.