I recently saw the Lincoln Center revival in New York, which was terrific - great music, acting, scenery, everything. I’d seen the movie version once as a kid, so much of the plot was new to me.
But that plot left me with some, uh, questions, that I’m hoping someone can help me out with… (SPOILERS, of course):
At the end of Act I, Emile has proposed to Nellie, she’s accepted, and they’re set to live happily ever after…when his two little kids accidentally run into the room. Kids that he’s kept hidden from her this whole time. Nellie is thrown for a loop, and while it quickly becomes clear that her problem is not that he has kids, per se, but that he’s had kids with a native woman, the bigger, more dramatic thing that I could see was that HE HID HIS KIDS FROM HER. When was he planning to tell her? How could he propose to a woman without telling her she’d become a wife and a mother at the same time? And why isn’t he ever vilified for this? Nellie’s struggle to overcome her racism consumes the whole second act, but Emile’s lies and deceptions are never even commented on! Why?
Emile never says he had a former “wife”; he just refers to “my children’s mother”. So they weren’t married, right? Considering the colonial setting, was she just a concubine of sorts, some young local girl who worked on his plantation who he had a couple kids with? In a Rodgers & Hammerstein universe, that can’t be alright, can it?
Speaking of power/sex imbalance, what are we to make of the relationship between Lt. Cable and Bloody Mary’s daughter? They can barely communicate, it’s implied he’s a good bit older than her (he’s got to be, what, mid-20s at the youngest; she’s referred to as a “young girl”), they sleep together within minutes of meeting, Bloody Mary is basically prostituting her daughter out…is this a glorified rape? Why is it portrayed as a great, thwarted romance?
When the soldiers march off to battle (or is it after a successful battle? my companion and I disagreed) in Act II, why do they sing that slow reprise of “Honey Bun”?? Dramatically, what is it supposed to mean? The best I could figure (assuming they were going to battle) was that they were scared out of their wits and singing something silly to calm their nerves. But it still felt weird. A reprise of “Cockeyed Optimist” would have made a little more sense as a song to remind them to keep their spirits up. But “Honey Bun”…?
Any thoughts appreciated!
Hey, Rodgers. I saw that revival last year, and I liked it, too.
I had the same reaction to the romance between Cable and Bloody Mary. I kind of figured maybe that’s why he’s the one who got killed off because if they didn’t get together but he lived it would look all racist but if they did it would look like Bloody Mary prostituted her daughter and Cable just went with it.
I never thought of it as weird that Emile hid his kids, but he did. I assume he wanted her to get to know him or she’d have written him off right away without even giving him a chance. Still messed up by today’s standards. I don’t know who the mother was, but I assumed he was married to her…but then, as you say, he never says “my wife.” Hm.
Not sure why they did the reprise of Honey Bun and it is a bit silly but it worked for me. I can’t explain it. I guess it’s just the juxtaposition of a horrifying scenario and a light song. Cliched but I liked it.
No, he wasn’t hiding the kids. They start out singing in the first scene, in front of Nellie. He just didn’t tell her he was their father, and that’s because he didn’t see the need to tell her – he figured she’s assume they were his because they were living in his house. Nellie, who couldn’t conceive of such a thing, never thought to ask and just assumed they were children of the servants. So there’s no need to comment, since it wasn’t a deception, just a misunderstanding.
It’s glossed over, but I think the play assumes they didn’t marry. But Rogers and Hammerstein were more than willing to suggest that (I assume it was also in Mitchner’s novel, too). Broadway didn’t have the Hayes office, so you could portray it that way.
This is presentism: you’re bringing 21st Century assumptions to the play. The intent was that Bloody Mary was offering her daughter in marriage to Cable – which wasn’t all that unusual throughout history. Neither was the young age – even in the US, it is legal in some states for a girl to marry at age 15 with the parent’s consent. In the island culture, moreover, a marriage was still an economic institution and a parent would often choose a husband based upon his wealth (which is what’s happening in the play – if Cable doesn’t accept her, there’s another suitor all lined up). Calling it “prostituting out” ignores the actual situation at the time. As for the love story, it’s portrayed that, even though they only just met, it was love at first sight.
They didn’t hear “Cockeyed Optimist” (Nellie sang it with the nurses); they all heard “Honey Bun” (It was part of the show-within-a-show). They sang it because it was a catchy tune and one you could march to.
Maybe there are different ways to stage it, but in the Lincoln Center production, the kids sing the song onstage by themselves, then are ushered out by the manservant before Nellie and Emile come on. At the end of Act I when the manservant accidentally lets the kids into the room, Emile obviously shoots him an angry look (again, maybe a staging decision), and it’s clear this is the first time Nellie has seen them. (She says something like, “What adorable children! Whose are they?”.)
As much as I know R&H were progressive for their day, I’m just surprised they’d be so cool about children born out of wedlock - to the point of not even commenting on it! In The King and I, for comparison, they criticize polygamy a good bit.
Fair enough. Bringing that 21st century set of assumptions to it, though, it’s still kind of creepy, and I’m surprised it’s not more commented on (in the way that, for example, many more people talk about the abuse issue in Carousel.)
Just that it was catchy? Anyone else have other theories?
My take was that he knew Nellie was provincial/racist as he probably had once been himself and feared that she would have no interest in him if he brought the kids out too early. He’s already considerably older than she is with a different nationality and first language, so he probably didn’t want to scare her away. He also perhaps felt that once she loved him she would accept his kids and grow to love them, which is in fact what happened. Not a deception so much as an omission. (Plus after his kids chased off that Austrian nun who came to be their governess he couldn’t take chances.;))
It hadn’t occurred til now that Rodgers & Hammerstein’s monster hits South Pacific, The King and I and Sound of Music all involve a woman taking care of a man’s children by other women.
I wonder if in the original ending to Oklahoma Curly tells Laurie “you know who’d love this surry with the fringe on top? My sons Wu Chang and Francois and my daughters Soledad and Little Tree, which reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to tell you…”.
In a recent production I saw, Emile brings the children into the room, introduces Nellie to them, and then reveals that they are his children. It’s not an accident; he both proposes and intentionally reveals his last secret to her simultaneously.
South Pacific is just “Oklahoma!” on the beach, just like “Show Boat” is esstially floating “Carousel.”
Only a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart [of Rodgers & Hammerstein]. “Having a plot that makes sense” wasn’t exactly the point of these type of plays.
That said, native women of the South Pacific were generally held to have extremely loose sexual morals. Starting with Captain Cook in the 1700, and continuing through “Coming of Age in Samoa” in 1928 westerners consistently emphasized the free sexual practices of South pacific islanders. Therefore, having sex and children outside of wedlock, no matter how scandalous for a proper Christian woman, would be unsurprising, almost expected, for the local heathens.
The funny thing is that R&H actually cleaned up a lot of the original Michener book (“Tales of the South Pacific”) that the musical is based on to make it more acceptable to audiences. For instance, in the book, Emile had EIGHT children by FOUR native islander mothers, none of whom he was married to.
Colonials and the native women - this is a popular theme in the short stories of William Somerset Maughm. I know none of you know of whom I’m talking, but he wrote many stories about Englishmen living in South East Asia, Malaysia, Hawaii, China. Before the second world war. His heroes, far from home, quite often had relationships with native women and fathered children. Then, the heroes would go home to England on leave, get married to a proper British girl, and bring her back to see the rubber plantation he’d been managing…“Oh, darling, who are those adorable little children with their mother out there, looking at our house?”
Tea girls warm & sweet/some are set up/in the Somerset Maugham sweet…
Also described by Holly Golightly as her ideal man in Breakfast at Tiffanys, which was visionary because it was written thirty years before the musical Chess.
Nellie’s from Arkansas. I have an image of her telling this to her father as why she broke off the engagement and him responding “Well, dumplin’, some men chew tobacco too, we all got our vices. A good wife pretends not to notice that the maid’s kids have the same eyebrows as her beau cause, well, it don’t do nobody any good to see it, and the important thing is he’s rich and wants to marry with ya…”.
I haven’t read Michener’s book. Does it say who the father of Bloody Mary’s daughter is? (I was wondering if she’s one of Emil’s.)
I’m from Alabama where half the Indians had Scottish and French ancestry or both (William McIntosh, Alexander McGillivray, Charles de Cournel- all of whom had Indian names as well) and a few of them had black fathers (including chief Micanopy). In the northeast many had a lot of English and Irish ancestry. Their relationships with their fathers ranged from barely-knew-him to conventional father-son relationships though all considered themselves members of their mothers people first and foremost even if they only had a minority of native ancestry. I wonder if the islands were similar with the matrilineages and the “who cares who your dad was” aspects.
Well, let’s see. South Pacific is about a provincial army nurse falling for an older French guy – who fled his country because he killed a man. Their relationship is complicated because he had an interracial relationship that resulted in two mixed-race kids. The two sub-leads consist of a smart, somewhat uptight but romantic soldier who falls head over heels for an innocent Polynesian girl whose mother is basically whoring her out. Show ends when an important mission goes partially awry and young soldier dies, after which our heroine realizes life’s too short to give a crap about bigotry. Our romantic leads end up together, young lead is still dead, and his girl probably ends up in a loveless marriage.
Oklahoma is about a stubborn young girl who has a flirty, love/hate relationship with a handsome young cowboy, complicated by her attempts to make him jealous by agreeing to go to a party with the creepy (and secretly dangerous) farmhand. The two supporting leads consist of a the heroine’s flirty, boy-hungry friend (who’s the daughter of the mayor) and a not-very-bright but good-natured cowboy. Show ends with all four leads happiliy paired up, Oklahoma statehood granted, and creepy guy dead.
Yeah, I can totally see the resemblence!
(I’ll grant that there are some nominal similarities between Carousel and Showboat, mainly a young idealistic girl falling under the spell of a rogue, but considering you can also cram into the same category Rigoletto, Phantom of the Opera, and nearly every romance novel ever written, that’s not exactly a big surprise.)
