By Louise
Link: https://www.cft.org.uk/whats-on/event/south-pacific-stream
Available until: Streams on Saturday 21st August at 2.30pm, and Thursday 26th and 31st August and Friday 3rd September at 7.30pm. Stream available for 24 hours.
A lot of theatres are starting to focus on in-person performances only, but there are still quite a few shows available online and Chichester Festival Theatre’s South Pacific is a great opportunity to see a staged production of a really enjoyable musical.
Director Daniel Evans’ production has a bit of everything, bringing out all the humour as well as the darker elements which I didn’t actually remember so maybe I was too young to notice them before. The stage is quite small and circular and Peter McKintosh’s sets transform it into whatever it needs to be. The sets have a really strong sense of place and they seem to be taken on and offstage really quickly so there are no pauses in the action.
Ann Yee is the choreographer and there are some really lovely dance sequences in this musical. They are full of energy and a lot of fun to watch. The actor playing Nellie is expecting a baby, but she seems very comfortable with all the routines so it’s obviously been really carefully choreographed. Some of the music sounds different from what I expected, but musical supervisor Nigel Lilley, MD Cat Beveridge, and David Cullen and Theo Jamieson, who have devised some new orchestration, have found some lovely colours in the music and made the score seem even more varied and beautiful.
The musical has some attitudes I wasn’t expecting and which were a little bit upsetting to watch. I’m not the best person to judge whether it was the right decision to leave these parts in the musical, but I do like the Chichester Festival Theatre’s honesty and bravery and I think showing it in this play is one way of educating people and showing us all how accepted racism used to be. But I really hope the audiences watching today know it is very wrong.
Gina Beck is a warm and lovely Nellie, singing beautifully and dancing energetically. Even though I didn’t agree with everything Nellie says, I was very invested in her as a character. Julian Ovenden looks quite young for Emile, but he has a really beautiful and quite operatic singing voice. Joanna Ampil provides some really wonderful characterisation and comedy as Bloody Mary, Rob Houchen is a sweet voiced Lt. Cable and Carl Au is funny as Stewpot. Sera Maehara who is a really stunning dancer makes a very strong impression as Liat.
This is a really good production of a great
musical theatre classic.
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