A school district's lesson in hate and fear

The Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Mississippi cancelled its prom rather than allow Constance McMillen, an openly lesbian student, to attend with her girlfriend and (horrors!) wear a tuxedo.

The school district said it was concerned about the "education, safety and well-being" of the students and took the action "due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events."

McMillen is a courageous young woman. I can imagine that her classmates are not too happy with her right now, when they should be directing their anger at the school district. Fortunately the ACLU has taken up her cause, filing a lawsuit to get the April 2 prom reinstated.

In addition to being bigoted, this is just silly.

Who would it hurt if McMillen wore a tuxedo and brought a girl to the prom? No one. If someone doesn't like it, that's their right. But they shouldn't be able to prevent a same-sex couple from attending any more than they could prevent an interfaith or interracial couple.

A school district so concerned about the "educational process" is teaching the wrong lesson. Instead of stressing the importance of acceptance, they've taught their students that it's acceptable to be intolerant.

As usual, a show tune says it best.

Sixty-one years ago, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote that we're not born hating or fearing anyone. We've got to be carefully taught.

Here's Glee's Matthew Morrison as Lt. Joseph Cable in the Broadway revival of South Pacific with a song that sadly, resonates today:

Why South Pacific matters

There's a very thoughtful column by Frank Rich in today's New York Times looking at why Lincoln Center's gorgeous revival of South Pacific has struck a chord with so many theatergoers. Not surprisingly, but effectively, he ties it to the war in Iraq and to our unresolved national debate about race.

Because the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, like "Some Enchanted Evening," are so embedded in our collective consciousness, everyone thinks they've seen the real South Pacific, Rich say, but what they usually mean is that they've seen the glossy, candy-colored 1958 movie. "They expect corn, but in a year when war and race are at center stage in the national conversation, this relic turns out to have a great deal to say."

When audiences saw the original musical, which opened on Broadway in 1949, the memories of World War II in the Pacific were obviously still fresh in their minds. They "had sons and brothers who had not returned home." Today, relatively few Americans have such a personal connection to the war in Iraq. Rich goes on to say that South Pacific forces us to do something most of us have become very adept at avoiding - think about that war.

"South Pacific reminds us that those whose memory we honor tomorrow — including those who served in Vietnam — are always at the mercy of the leaders who send them into battle," Rich writes. "It increases our admiration for the selflessness of Americans fighting in Iraq."

Like war, the matters of race at the heart of South Pacific also are very much alive today. Nurse Nellie Forbush struggles to accept the mixed-race children of French planter Emile de Becque. "Years before Little Rock’s 1957 racial explosion," Rich says, "Nellie moves beyond her prejudices, propelled by life and love and the circumstances of war. She charts a path that much of America, North and South, would haltingly begin to follow."

What struck me most about the column was its ending. A few months ago, I weighed in, along with many other bloggers, about the value of theatre. Rich, who was the Times' theatre critic for years, gives us an indication of what his answer might be as he contemplates the hopeful scene at the end of South Pacific and why it moves many theatergoers to tears.

"We weep for the same reason we often do when we experience a catharsis at the theater. We grieve deeply for our losses and our failings, even as we feel an undertow of cockeyed optimism about the possibilities of healing and redemption that may yet lie ahead."

"You've Got to Be Carefully Taught"

There's an interesting two-page spread about South Pacific in the current issue of Newsweek. It's a review that also recounts the show's history, some of its themes, and the relevance of its plot about World War II in the Pacific to audiences in 2008.

I knew that one of the stories, the romance between Lt. Joe Cable and a beautiful young Polynesian woman named Liat, was daring when South Pacific opened on Broadway in 1949. But until I read Cathleen McGuigan's article, I didn't realize the full extent of the controversy behind one of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical's most memorable songs, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught."

Cable, played in the current Lincoln Center revival by Matthew Morrison, sings the song as a retort to Kelli O'Hara's nurse Nellie Forbush, who says she can't help the way she feels about the two half-Polynesian children of French planter Emile De Beque, and breaks off their relationship. The lyrics take issue with the notion that human beings are born bigoted. We have to be taught to hate as children, the song says, it doesn't come naturally.

It's a pretty clear message and today, it seems obvious. (Also, what's the chance today that a song from musical theatre would cause such an uproar?) Of course it's absurd to think that we're born hating anyone. I mean, the song's sentiments would be perfectly at home on Barney or Sesame Street for heaven's sake:

"You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught."

But according to Laurence Maslon, author of the new book The South Pacific Companion, there was pressure during the out-of-town tryouts to change "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" or to cut it from the show entirely. Thankfully, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II refused.

James Michener, who wrote Tales of the South Pacific, on which the musical was based, recalled "The authors replied stubbornly that this number represented why they had wanted to do this play, and that even if it meant the failure of the production, it was going to stay in."

In this weekend's New York Times, reporter Larry Bloom also mentions the controversy in a story recalling South Pacific's tryout at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Conn. Until "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught," Bloom says, Rodgers and Hammerstein hadn't made social commentary a hallmark of their work.

Bloom writes, "Michener recalled in The World Is My Home that an agitated man accosted him at New Haven’s Union Station and warned: “Your play will fail if you leave that song in about racial prejudice. It’s ugly, it’s untimely and it’s not what patrons want to hear when they go to a musical.”

Well, thankfully that man was wrong. South Pacific opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949, with "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" intact, and played for 1,925 performances, closing on Jan. 16, 1954.

But apparently the show's success didn't silence the bigots. McGuigan writes that when South Pacific was was performed in Atlanta in the early 1950s, "it was denounced on the floor of the Georgia Legislature, for Cable's song (termed propaganda "inspired by Moscow") and for the theme of interracial relationships: "Intermarriage produces half-breeds," said one legislator. "And half-breeds are not conducive to the higher type of society."

Scholar Andrea Most, in an article for Theatre Journal in 2000 about the politics of race in South Pacific, says that one Georgia state legislator even claimed that a song justifying interracial marriage was a threat to the American way of life. Most writes that Hammerstein expressed surprise at the idea that "anything kind and humane must necessarily originate in Moscow."

I guess you could say that the whole issue sounds quaint and outdated, with little relevance for today's audience. And in a year when Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, is running for president, that view is understandable. But the lesson behind "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" is one we can still use. And am I the only one who thinks that the controversy about interracial relationships and their supposed threat to the American way of life sounds familiar in a more current context?

In Newsweek, McGuigan also includes the very moving coda that appears on a scrim at the end of the South Pacific revival. For me, it put what I'd just seen in perspective and gave the show an added level of resonance. I won't repeat it here in case you're going to see South Pacific and you want to be surprised, but you can find it on Page 2 of her article.

The South Pacific Companion, by the way, will be published on May 6. It covers the show's Broadway debut, its many incarnations over the decades, and the current revival. Maslon is a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and coauthor of the companion volume to the excellent PBS series Broadway: The American Musical.

For a little taste of what the South Pacific sounds like today, you can hear Maslon and some of the principals involved in the current production in this interview on National Public Radio. And the Lincoln Center Theater Review has a special issue devoted to South Pacific, which you can read online.

Just hearing a few brief clips of that gorgeous score has me wishing I could see South Pacific again, this time from the orchestra section. Since that's unlikely, I'll have to be content with the cast CD, which will be released on May 27.

South Pacific

From the opening strains of the overture, when the stage slid back to reveal a 30-piece orchestra, to a moving coda that appeared as a backdrop at the end, I was captivated by Lincoln Center's sumptuous production of South Pacific. I'd watched the 1958 movie and the 2006 concert on DVD, but really, there's nothing like seeing it on stage and hearing all of that glorious music performed live.

This was my first time seeing a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on stage, and it was truly a wonderful experience - funny and moving and tender. Call me as corny as Kansas in August, but I was totally swept up by the songs, by the feeling that I was looking down from my seat in the Vivian Beaumont Theater's loge on another place and time. Even if you've never seen South Pacific, chances are you've heard a verse or two from "Some Enchanted Evening" or "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," or one of its many other memorable songs, at some point in your life.

Plus, I've always had a huge interest in 20th century U.S. history and I've always loved James Michener's super-detailed historical novels. What I was intrigued by in the plot, based on Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific, is that it illuminates the first stirrings of how World War II changed America.

The war gave countless young people their first experiences interacting with other cultures. It brought women into the work force in unprecedented numbers to take the place of men who were overseas. It was also a war in which we were ostensibly fighting against bigotry of Nazi Germany, yet we seemed unable to overcome our own prejudices.

That contradiction, between what we preach and what we practice, is played out in South Pacific's two main plot strands: the love of Lt. Joe Cable, played by Matthew Morrison, for Liat, a beautiful young Polynesian woman, played by Li Jun Li, and the love of Ensign Nellie Forbush, played by Kelli O'Hara, for Frenchman Emile De Beque, (Paulo Szot), who has two half-Polynesian children.

While the rest of America would take decades to catch up, at least South Pacific shows Forbush, a Southerner, and Cable, an upper-class Princeton graduate, questioning their prejudices. In a musical filled with beautiful songs, there is nothing with more relevance than when Cable sings about the origin of our bigotry in "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught."

Although we don't actually see any of the horrors of battle or wounded soldiers, Bartlett Sher's direction and Michael Yeargan's scenic design ensure that the war is never far from our thoughts. And I have to give Sher credit for not downplaying the era's racism - for showing the black seamen apart at a time when the military was segregated, and as jarring as a word like "Japs" was to hear, it would have felt phony to change it to the less-offensive "Japanese."

I was also drawn to the giant maps of the South Pacific that dropped down when the action switched to the captain's office. I kept looking for names I recognized, like Guadalcanal. I thought about all the families that had smaller versions clipped from newspapers, reading the unfamiliar names and trying to imagine where their loved ones were, whether they were safe.

I don't think South Pacific is perfect by any means. It was a little unseemly the way Loretta Ables Sayre's Bloody Mary pushed her daughter at Lieutenant Cable. The two of them seem to fall in love very quickly. And Bloody Mary, with her pidgin English, is a caricature.

But I loved the performances, especially O'Hara's. She was sweet and spunky and smart, the type of woman who, if it weren't for the war, would never have ventured far from her home in Little Rock, never have joined the Navy, never have fallen in love with a man like De Beque, but who rises to the challenge in every way.

The musical staging, by Christopher Gattelli, was always great to look at, but I especially loved "I'm Gonna Wash that Man Right out of My Hair." I loved seeing O'Hara prance around on stage, get into the shower and actually wash her hair. When I review it in my mind, it still makes me smile. And while many of the musicals I've seen over the past years have had big, showstopping numbers for their finales, there's something sweet and understated about the quiet, tender ending of South Pacific.

I can completely understand why South Pacific was so popular with audiences when it opened on Broadway in 1949. Perhaps the musical doesn't show us how we were in reality, but it's how we liked to think of ourselves - brave, adventurous, inventive, with a can-do attitude. We were "Cockeyed Optimists," like Nellie Forbush, entrepreneurs like Danny Burstein's sailor Luther Billis, always trying to think up schemes to make a buck, and like Lieutenant Cable, we never shirked our responsibility.

In a recent article in The New York times, Charles Isherwood compared two views of America in South Pacific and another current Broadway revival, Gypsy. He contrasted South Pacific's cheery optimism with the darker tone and theme in Gypsy, calling them "theatrical bookends" of the 1950s.

But I think there's a better contrast. The play that I would pair South Pacific with is the contemporary dysfunctional family drama August: Osage County. If South Pacific is the idealized, romanticized beginning of the Greatest Generation, then August is when it all comes crashing to an end in old age and illness, in a torrent of anger and bitterness. As someone with an interest in theatre and postwar American history, what an amazing, thought-provoking double feature those two would make.

I think audiences today have to see South Pacific as a product of its time, as an example of how we saw ourselves as Americans at a specific point in history. It was the last war we all marched off to together, and unless there's a draft again, the last war we will ever march off to together. Since the end of World War II, we've really only had a few national, communal experiences. We're much more culturally and politically fragmented today.

That's what made the final words of South Pacific so moving. Before Sept. 11, 2001, the last time we were attacked on our own soil was Dec. 7, 1941. And what did we do? We rolled up our sleeves, mobilized factories, planted Victory Gardens, used ration coupons, fought the forces of evil across the world - and won.

But someday soon, the places where those battles were fought will become as distant as Shiloh and Gettysburg. When the grandchildren of the baby boomers ask what was so great about the Greatest Generation, South Pacific isn't the only answer or perhaps even the best, but it would be a pretty good place to start.

Sher excitement

The New York Times had nice package of stories yesterday in its spring theater preview. There was also a great profile by Alex Witchel in the magazine of director Bartlett Sher.

I didn't know that much about Sher, and what I thought I knew turned out to be wrong. I thought he was British, because I knew there was a British actor named Antony Sher, and I figured they were brothers. Well, he's not and they're not. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. (I did learn that his name is pronounced sheer, he grew up in California, his parents went through a nasty divorce, and as a child, he broke an unusually high number of bones).

Currently, Sher is in rehearsals for Lincoln Center's revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacfic. I'm thrilled that I'll be in the audience next month for South Pacific, which begins previews on Saturday and opens April 3.

It'll be a trio of firsts: the first-ever Broadway revival of the show, plus my first time at Lincoln Center. And while I grew up watching Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like Cinderella, Oklahoma and The King and I on television, this will be my first time watching one on stage.

Brendan Lemon, the New York theater critic for the Financial Times, is writing a backstage blog for South Pacific on the Lincoln Center Web site. In his latest post, on Feb. 20, he says that the show is now in "tech hell," with working days lasting until nearly midnight.

For me, what's most interesting is the extent to which the creative team is going to make South Pacific historically accurate, and Sher's comments on what the musical offers to an audience that, by and large, no longer remembers World War II.

In the midst of scene analysis, dance and movement work, the cast has been given a short history lesson on the war in the Pacific, Lemon writes. They've heard from professional historians and veterans of World War II.

Sarna Lapine, the assistant director, is South Pacific's unofficial on-site historian. "For the current assignment, I spent four days in Washington doing research primarily at the Naval Historical Society. I talked to people from the Marine Armory in Brooklyn, who've helped us find people to help instruct the cast in things like how to handle a weapon."

Lapine adds that she showed the script to her brother Seth, a Marine Corps major who's served in Iraq, and the two have discussed it in detail. "In many ways, he's been the most valuable resource I had as I went about trying to help everybody understand what it's like to be in the Navy -- an organization with so many rules and regulations."

For his part, Sher believes that South Pacific has a great deal of relevance for Americans in 2008. "I would say that, more than any single piece I've ever worked on, as an American artist I have been impressed by the depth and resonance and contemporary intelligence of the piece."

While race, and racism, play a big part in South Pacific's story, Sher focuses more on what he views as the central difference between America in the 1940s and America in 2008.

"In order to understand the world of South Pacific," he says, "you have to have an innate understanding of national sacrifice. You have to realize that as a nation in the 1940s we were all involved in the same struggle. We were all connected to the same thing. And the one thing we know now is that we are never connected to the same thing. We have almost no idea that there's a war going on, we don't feel connected to it, we don't feel any sense of shared sacrifice - none of it."

I think Sher brings up a fascinating point. South Pacific ran on Broadway for 1,925 performances, from 1949 to 1954. Memories of World War II were still fresh in people's minds, and it was a war that touched every American.

I haven't seen any of the plays, and very few of the movies and documentaries, that have been written about the war in Iraq. For most Americans, they have a very different feel - of outsiders looking in. I'm not sure that any work today - whether it's for the theater, movies or television - could create the same shared experience that the audiences for South Pacific had a half-century ago.