Musical review: South Pacific: Theatre Royal, Glasgow

LET’S suppose that we have lived through the great American Century, and that the new millennium will be dominated by other powers, elsewhere.

For all that, though, we still need to understand that 20th century, with its strengths, its weaknesses and its wars, and it’s hard to imagine a better starting point than Rodgers and Hammerstein’s mighty 1949 musical South Pacific, set around an American naval base in Polynesia during the Second World War.

The show is based on the novel by James A Michener, yet it would be a mistake to imagine that Michener’s writing contained the political substance, while Rodgers and Hammerstein only added the showbiz glitz.

For it’s the show’s magnificent score – with its string of unforgettable melodies, and its dazzling variety of moods and rhythms – that reflects the brilliant vitality and romance of American popular culture in the mid-20th century, and embodies the huge “soft power” that, for a while, made America the promised land towards which a whole planet yearned.

This good-looking, sexy and vibrant British version of the Lincoln Center’s acclaimed production, at the Theatre Royal until next week, attempts no fancy updated interpretation of the show.

What it has, though, is a fine cast who act with conviction, even if sometimes a shade woodenly, and who sing those magnificent songs as if they had been written yesterday, from the great romantic anthems Some Enchanted Evening and Younger Than Springtime, to the searing, scornful anti-racism of You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.

EastEnders star Samantha Womack, as young Ensign Nellie Forbush, sings sweetly and radiantly rather than powerfully. But since sweetness, intelligence, and a willingness to learn are the keys to the character of this all-American heroine, her performance is one to cherish; and the beauty and strength of the score puts every musical written in the past three decades comprehensively in the shade, and make us blush for our 21st-century lack of creative ambition, of optimism, lyricism and heart.

Rating: ****