The Musical as Drama

reason the song is so powerful is that its sentimental message
coordinates with the means of its performance. Nettie can sing
it for Julie and to Julie because Nettie has community in her
heart, community and perhaps nothing else. And eventually, at
the end of the show, the song will be sung as a chorale, when
Louise graduates from high school. For once not the loner in
her class, the outcast daughter of the reprobate Billy, Louise
joins with the others (and Nettie) in singing this same number.
The only person who does not sing is Billy. He is standing by as
a ghost, learning the Rodgers and Hammerstein code at last. He
has seen himself reflected in his daughter’s isolation in the beach
ballet, and now he sees her being drawn into the graduation
chorale. Something is finally breaking through Billy’s simplistic
individualism, and it is the spirit of community performance
that just about everyone else in this musical has understood all
along.
South Pacificopens at a far remove from the ensemble num-
ber. First, a children’s duet, “Dites-Moi”; then, after the princi-
pals enter, a solo for Nellie Forbush, “A Cockeyed Optimist”;
then twin soliloquies for the would-be lovers, showing that
they share a melody even though they think they are ruminat-
ing to themselves; then—in what may be the smoothest transi-
tion into a romantic solo in all musicals—“Some Enchanted
Evening,” in which the love-at-first-sight being sung about has
already happened and may have happened too late. The entire
scene is brilliantly intimate in its introduction of the love story
from different perspectives, but it is also setting up the contrast
with the male chorus to follow in the next scene, a bunch of
Seabees and Marines roaring out “Bloody Mary is the girl I
love.” The ensemble is held back, in favor of something en-
tirely different in the intimate opening, but then they come on,
these horny hell-raisers, and the musical is hitting its stride.
Somehow at least one of the characters from the delicate scene
will have to work into performance mode with these Seabees,
an event that transpires in the “Thanksgiving Follies” of act 2,
especially when Nellie joins Luther Billis in “Honey Bun.”
By the time of The King and I, it was virtually expected that a
Rodgers and Hammerstein show would open quietly (after the

88 CHAPTER FOUR