This operation, dubbed Alligator, occurs in the penultimate story, "The Landing at Kuralei". Each stands independently but revolves around the preparation for an American military operation to dislodge the Japanese from a nearby island. Tales of the South Pacific comprises nineteen stories. These stories, collected into Tales of the South Pacific, won Michener the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She told him also of her plans to oppose colonialism in French Indochina. Punctuated with profanity learned from GIs, she complained endlessly to Michener about the French colonial government, which refused to allow her and other Tonkinese to return to their native Vietnam, lest the plantations be depopulated. On a plantation on the island of Espiritu Santo, he met a woman named Bloody Mary she was small, almost toothless, her face stained with red betel juice. Struck by the name, Michener wrote it down and soon began to record, on a battered typewriter, his version of the tales. One journey took him to the Treasury Islands, where he discovered an unpleasant village, called Bali-ha'i, populated by "scrawny residents and only one pig". ![]() He survived a plane crash in New Caledonia the near-death experience motivated him to write fiction, and he began listening to the stories told by soldiers. He was not sent to the South Pacific theater until April 1944, when he was assigned to write a history of the Navy in the Pacific and was allowed to travel widely. The 2008 Broadway revival, a critical success, ran for 996 performances and won seven Tonys, including Best Musical Revival.Īlthough book editor and university instructor James Michener could have avoided military service in World War II as a birthright Quaker, he enlisted in the U.S. The show has enjoyed many successful revivals and tours, spawning a 1958 film and television adaptations. Its original cast album was the bestselling record of the 1940s, and other recordings of the show have also been popular. The production won ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Libretto, and it is the only musical production to win Tony Awards in all four acting categories. Several of its songs, including " Bali Ha'i", " I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair", " Some Enchanted Evening", " There Is Nothing Like a Dame", " Happy Talk", " Younger Than Springtime", and " I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy", have become popular standards. Especially in the Southern U.S., its racial theme provoked controversy, for which its authors were unapologetic. The piece won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950. After they signed Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin as the leads, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote several of the songs with the particular talents of their stars in mind. The original Broadway production enjoyed immense critical and box-office success, became the second-longest running Broadway musical to that point (behind Rodgers and Hammerstein's earlier Oklahoma! (1943)), and has remained popular ever since. ![]() Because he lacked military knowledge, Hammerstein had difficulty writing that part of the script the director of the original production, Logan, assisted him and received credit as co-writer of the book. Supporting characters, including a comic petty officer and the Tonkinese girl's mother, help to tie the stories together. The issue of racial prejudice is candidly explored throughout the musical, most controversially in the lieutenant's song, " You've Got to Be Carefully Taught". Marine lieutenant and a young Tonkinese woman, explores his fears of the social consequences should he marry his Asian sweetheart. The plot centers on an American nurse stationed on a South Pacific island during World War II, who falls in love with a middle-aged expatriate French plantation owner but struggles to accept his mixed-race children. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Michener's work that would be financially successful and, at the same time, send a strong progressive message on racism. Michener's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. 2008 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical
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