This book explores the development of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s classic Broadway musical South Pacific. In particular, it notes how the team balanced the creation of a commercially successful work with the desire to make a passionate statement against racial intolerance that they knew would almost certainly be controversial. Through the examination of archival materials, many of which are heretofore unexplored in the literature on Rodgers and Hammerstein, the book reveals the creative processes of two masters near the peak of their craft. In addition, this book explores the music ... More

This book explores the development of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s classic Broadway musical South Pacific. In particular, it notes how the team balanced the creation of a commercially successful work with the desire to make a passionate statement against racial intolerance that they knew would almost certainly be controversial. Through the examination of archival materials, many of which are heretofore unexplored in the literature on Rodgers and Hammerstein, the book reveals the creative processes of two masters near the peak of their craft. In addition, this book explores the musical as a cultural, social, and political text of the postwar and early cold war eras. Using contemporaneous sources as well as recent scholarship, it analyzes South Pacific in terms of how it deals with, or reflects, postwar constructs of race, gender, colonialism, and the then new prototype of the rising young business executive. Moreover, each subject is examined from a unique perspective. For instance, Nellie Forbush’s racial intolerance is viewed through the lens of literature about race during the prewar era, the time when her ideas would have developed; and the chapter on gender reveals how Hammerstein altered the gender constructs of his principal characters from how they appeared in James A. Michener’s novel Tales of the South Pacific, on which the musical was based. Through exploring the work’s development and reading it as an open text revealing of its time and of contemporary American society, this book offers new insight into South Pacific and its creators.