In its day (1947, right after the war), South Pacific was (rightly) regarded as a brave, bold statement against racial prejudice and bigotry, with Pacific Islanders standing in allegorically for black Americans. It’s interesting to see how attitudes and standards have changed since.
The main story line concerns Army nurse Nellie Forbush, an all-American farm girl from Arkansas, “as corny as Kansas in August,” who falls in love with (trigger alert!) a French colonial plantation owner, Émile le Becque. All is hearts and flowers until she meets his biracial children from an earlier marriage to a Polynesian woman, at which point she breaks off the relationship in revulsion. (Don’t worry, they get together again in the end.)
In the subplot, young Lieutenant Joe Cable is in love with an island girl, Liat, but can’t imagine bringing her home to his family in the States. The affair ends tragically when Cable is killed in action by the Japanese, thereby averting the moral crisis over whether to marry her.
All this would be considered “problematic” in today’s racial climate. All of the combat troops are white men. Women like Nellie are confined to support roles like nursing; blacks are nowhere in sight. (Of course all this reflects actual World War II realities.) That line in the song about “people whose eyes are differently made” originally said “oddly made,” as if only round, Caucasian eyes were natural or normal.
The part of Liat in the original cast was played by Betta St. John, a white actress from California, in makeup; her mother, Bloody Mary (so named by the American soldiers because of the blood-red betel nuts she chews), was played by Juanita Hall, half African American and half Italian. That casting would never be considered acceptable today, when black or Asian actors are routinely cast as Romeo or Juliet (not both!) or King Lear or Richard III, but don’t you dare cast a white actor as Othello, the Moor of Venice.
Maybe we need to rescind the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Rodgers and Hammerstein and cancel all future performances of their works. Wouldn’t want to trigger anyone’s discomfort.
