Review: SLOC offers enchanting evening in the South Pacific

While “Some Enchanted Evening” serves as a romantic leitmotif throughout this Rodgers & Hammerstein show from 1949, the song’s words “You may see a stranger” also fit another theme — racism — and the scene between Lt. Cable (Tyler Thomas) and Emile de Becque (Steven Leifer) in Act II is, for me, the emotional highlight of this superb production of “South Pacific.” More about that shortly.

Let me get to the other reasons you should see SLOC’s staging of this Pulitzer Prize winner. Of course, the tuneful score is hardwired in our brains, and this large cast, under the direction of Peter Caracappa and the musical tutelage of Adrienne Sherman, sails through it. Big production numbers such as “Bloody Mary,” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” and “Honey Bun” are full of sass and sparkle. A nod, too, to choreographer Brittany Leigh Glenn, and the intimate songs — “Bali Ha’i,” “Younger Than Springtime,” “Twin Soliloquies” and “My Girl Back Home” — are delivered by voices of extraordinary quality.

Tech work: The show has 25 scenes, but Michael McDermott’s set is merely, yet effectively, suggestive; the cast handles the pieces; and Michael Silvia’s lighting design aptly creates place and mood. Thus, the pace is crisp. Kudos, as well, to Danielle O’Brien’s costumes.

Supporting players: John Sutliff, as Capt. Brackett, credibly gets us through dramatic scenes that certainly made more sense to post-World War II audiences, but which seem rather plodding now; Patrick Reilly is amusing as Seabee Stewpot; and Elizabeth Sherwood-Mack captures the humor and the pathos of Bloody Mary.

Leads: If you need a second banana to jumpstart a scene, call Matthew Dembling. Dembling properly makes smooth-talking sailor Luther Billis an exhausting force to be reckoned with. The actor’s line readings are quick and funny, and his physical energy never flags.

I had the pleasure of seeing Heather-Liz Copps in a non-singing role at Albany Civic Theater last year; the pleasure is doubled here because she also sings, gloriously. Copps’s Nellie Forbush is chiefly aw-shucks in both dialogue and song—rightly so, but Copps’s navigation of the emotional shoals of “A Wonderful Guy” is more — every note becomes self-discovery. She has comic timing in “A Cockeyed Optimist” and enough dramatic savvy to make the U-turn in Nellie’s feelings plausible.

Now back to that scene in Act II. Cable, who’s in love with Liat (Stephanie De Fronzo), a young Tonkinese woman, rails against his own racial prejudice in the fierce “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught,” which is immediately followed by de Becque’s lament that, because of Nellie’s prejudice towards his biracial children, he is doomed to live alone: “This Nearly Was Mine,” as beautifully sung as you could ever hope to hear it. Both Thomas (a ringing tenor) and Leifer (a rich bass, whose French accent is spot-on) are such remarkable singing actors throughout that when Cable and de Becque arrive at this moment, their pain is completely earned.

All in all, a deeply moving and frequently hilarious production.

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