This was the first song that popped into my head when I needed a Rodgers and Hammerstein song for a footnote earlier today. I came up with something else for that post, but the song "Younger Than Springtime" has stuck with me all morning. I rewatched this version — from the movie "South Pacific" — even though I don't like the singer's voice and I find it absurd the way the man has to hold up the woman the entire time he's singing...
Now, the actor you see there — in his shirtless glory — is John Kerr, but the voice belongs to Bill Lee. I mean, I don't particularly like the voice, but they could have had anybody. They didn't need the singer to look great shirtless and nonridiculous with that woman swooning in his arms for 3 minutes. But I guess the people of the time (1958) liked that voice. Bill Lee was also the singing voice of Prince Charming in "Snow White and the Three Stooges" and the singing voice of Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music."
I much prefer this version of "Younger Than Springtime" by Frank Sinatra. I love everything about this, including when he waves with his tie at Nancy Sinatra:
By the way the character in the story, Marine Lieutenant Joe Cable, loves the woman, who is Tonkinese, but — spoiler alert — rejects her because of racism and, out of dramatic necessity, dies in battle.
February 19, 2018
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71 comments:
They should com out with a gay version.
Maybe it is a problem with the compression algorithm, but the girl in the South Pacific video looks as though she has a mustache.
Not that there is anything wrong with that!
You better wash Bill Lee right out of your hair.
I find "South Pacific" very funny.
They're writing a screed against racism, in which I father decides he might as well go off and die, his life no longer worth living, since he's been rejected by a white woman over his two brown skinned children.
At apparently never occurred to Rodgers and Hammerstein that a man with two young children has every reason to live, and therefore has no business going off on a suicide mission. Apparently, to them, it's only the love of white women that matters.
Then there's also the song "You've got to be taught to hate," which sets new levels of delusion. No, you don't have to be taught to hate, you have to be taught NOT to hate the out group. The definition of who's in the out group changes, but hatred of the out group is the default
I have never seen a non-gay version of a Hollywood musical.
John Kerr was also a lawyer IRL.
Isn't the "woman", Liat, actually a girl (underage)?
Frank holding a lit squiggie through the whole thing. What a guy.
"John Kerr was also a lawyer IRL."
I noticed that. He went to Phillips Exeter and then Harvard, "took an interest in film directing... but Kerr was quickly disenchanted by the mundane aspects of the work, and applied to and was accepted at UCLA Law School. He graduated from law school, and passed the California bar in 1970. He later pursued a full-time career as a Beverly Hills lawyer,but still accepted occasional small roles in a variety of television productions over the years."
Nice!
Women have swooned in my arms for much longer than three minutes, so that part is entirely realistic from my POV.
Singing to them all the while? That part is a stretch, but it is after all simply a movie-musical, operatic convention.
Or I may be off. I can't sing a note, but maybe the other fellows have done this while singing.
From the Washington Post, 1977: Cable had to song to sing after he made love to Liat in the hut. The first effort, "Suddenly Lucky," was rejected by Logan as the "lightweight" for the circumstances. The composer and lyricist came up with a tune called "My Wife" that had been dropped from their show "Allegro," and, with new lyrics, it became "Younger Than Springtime."
"Suddenly Lucky," by the way, was not forgotten. Two years later, and with new words, the song becames "Getting To Know You" in "The King and I."
I have never seen a non-gay version of a Hollywood musical.
Maybe not, but I once saw a production of Fiddler on the Roof with an all-gentile cast.
"South Pacific" is conventionally PC for its time.
It misconstrues actual attitudes of the colonialists of the day. It assumes prejudices that did not apply. They were happy to make happy with native women. The whole thing is right there in Kipling's "Mandalay", the "Burma girl", Kiplings "pretty almond-colored girl". Not to mention the large numbers of real-life Eurasians.
The real problem, that it doesnt get right, almost, is the attitude of white women. That too was PC then and now.
Too many violins, and then they have to throw in Nancy with the laughing face. It's a sappy song to begin with, and, in both renditions, they trowel on even more sappiness. In the movie version, I would prefer to see the girl topless. That would give the lyrics some bite and sex appeal..........Random observation: Mary Martin's voice has just the right lilt to deliver a Rodgers melody. Okay, he found some nuggets, but Rodgers was not Sinatra's richest mine.
How can ya not like "Some Enchanted Evening"? What are ya, uh mizantrope or sumthin'?
Seriously, the reviewers when the play first opened knew that that song, at least, would be a classic.
I like the original Enzio Pinza version best. SEE is still probably the greatest baritone "aria" Broadway has ever written.
"Isn't the "woman", Liat, actually a girl (underage)?"
I'm seeing that the script says: "A small figure appears in a doorway, a girl, perhaps seventeen."
Whether she's of age for sexual intercourse would depend on the applicable law, but it isn't illegal to fall in love with an underage person, just to have sexual intercourse!
I think the nakedness of the man and the positioning of the bodies is intended to make us feel there is a subliminal effect of sexual intercourse, but the song is very much in a lofty realm. It's not I-want-your-body kind of stuff! It's rather celestial, as if she is the entire world and he is God:
I touch your hand
And my arms grows strong,
Like a pair of birds
That burst with song.
My eyes look down
At your lovely face,
And I hold a world
In my embrace.
That's the intro section that Sinatra (wisely) skips.
The main part of the song is:
Younger than springtime, are you
Softer than starlight, are you,
Warmer than winds of June,
Are the gentle lips you gave me.
Gayer than laughter, are you,
Sweeter than music, are you,
Angel and lover, heaven and earth,
Are you to me.
And when your youth
And joy invade my arms,
And fill my heart as now they do,
Then younger than springtime, am I,
Gayer than laughter, am I,
Angel and lover, heaven and earth,
Am I with you!
Notice "Angel and lover, heaven and earth, Am I with you!" See what I mean? The 2 of them together are the earth and the heaven. She is the world held in his arms, in the beginning, so later, she's "earth" and he's the "heaven" that surrounds or holds the earth. He is the "angel" with her, the "lover." Through love, he becomes sublimely exalted. I know, maybe that's your idea of sexual intercourse, and if you can get there, good for you. But if you want to hear "And when your youth and joy invade my arms... then younger than springtime am I" as a pedophile's delusion, then, come on, that's really sad.
In the story, the mother really wants Liat to marry Cable, so that would be a marriage with parental consent, and if that were to happen, the age for sexual intercourse could be quite low.
From Wikipedia: "When all exceptions are taken into account, 25 U.S. states have no minimum age requirement. Twenty-five of the jurisdictions have a minimum age in these cases, the youngest being 13 (New Hampshire, females only). Human Rights Watch pointed out that Afghanistan has a tougher law on child marriage than parts of the US: in Afghanistan girls can marry at 16, or at 15 with permission from their father or a judge, while in 25 US states there is no minimum marriage age if all the other conditions are met."
I'd love to hear Frank's response to someone telling him he can't smoke in hear.
I agree that the song, "You have to be Carefully Taught", is a lie. All you need is for a bunch of so-called out-group bullies to rough you up and steal your watch, in the first grade, on the school bus. Have the bus driver ignore the incident, because he is of the same group, and have the assistant principal, who is also of the same group, tell me it was my fault for giving my son a watch for his 6th birthday. Who exactly is the out-group in this scenario?
James Michener was an English teacher and then a college Professor who was called up as a US Navy officer in WWII. In his writing career, he sold 75 million books and donated 100 million dollars to colleges and Museums.
But it all started with his collection of stories called Tales of the South Pacific winning a Pulitzer prize in 1947. Don't miss the one he called The Milk Run.
"Bloody Mary" and Liat are by far the most realistic characters in "South Pacific". Attitudes and etc. were all drawn from life, straight out of Michener, who drew from life.
Damn right she wants her daughter to marry that catch of catches, a wealthy white man.
If someone here has any idea of what Bali High is about, I'd love to hear it. That is one weird song. I think it's about death. I also hear echos of "Death & the Maiden" in "Younger Than Springtime", too.
Morbid, yes, but remember this is a play about lust & love in the middle of the Pacific War, where people you love went away & never came back.
And yes, do read "Tales of the South Pacific". It is his best work because its the closest to his actual experience.
Broadway mostly extracted fluff out of that, but some substance too.
From "South Pacific — Musical Orientalism" (HuffPo):
"We have Bloody Mary — the stereotypical hustler, selling grass skirts, mysterious potions, and finally her own daughter. And then there is Liat, the teenage daughter who Mary pimps to the upstanding Lieutenant Joe Cable. What a lovely cross-cultural match. What a perfect bride. Indeed, Liat speaks not a word in the whole musical, only smiles and takes the Yankee to bed. She’s underage; he’s a pedophile. What a fantasy of the white western male, the submissive, exoticized and eroticized Asian “girl” to, to what? Well, to screw of course. But here the authors turn on their liberal sympathy. She is not only for screwing but for helping Cable to get in touch with his gentle side, his body, his heart. Liat helps Joe feel “Younger than Springtime.” Yes, she is a sensual prop and he is going through changes. He is the subject, she is the object."
From a 2010 review of a production of "SP": "... Cable... delivering a gorgeous, blistering “Younger Than Springtime”, brings to mind vague, troubling hints of pedophilia...."
Marine Lieutenant Joe Cable, loves the woman, who is Tonkinese, but — spoiler alert — rejects her because of racism and, out of dramatic necessity, dies in battle.
So it's sort of like Younger than Springtime for Hitler.
Sinatra could make almost any dreck sound good, as he did there.
We wake up our children belting out "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma. THey wake up. They are irritated but they wake up.
I guess those 2 characters do have sexual intercourse, now that I'm reading more about the story.
I saw the show once, maybe 30 years ago and don't remember that much.
I must say that watching the clip today, I felt the line "I touch your hand and my arms grow strong..." was a poetic substitution and he was essentially saying he gets an erection. Then all that "strong arms" posing for the duration of the song: that man has sexual endurance.
"Bali Hai" is in one reading a love song, or rather a song about love as an ideal, a paradise longed for. Not about a particular love but a desire to love.
The alternate reading is the romance of the exotic. Back we are again to Kiplings "Mandalay", into which you can pack "Bali Hai" as a stanza, more or less.
@AA,
From "South Pacific — Musical Orientalism" (HuffPo):
It's funny & just downright unfortunate how life in the middle of a world war just doesn't respect the tender sensibilities of our betters, isn't it?
US theatrical reviewers are very, very far from reality.
They seem to reject what is, requiring what they would rather.
A cloud-cuckooland it seems, full of humans that aren't.
They object to actual people.
I have met any number of "Bloody Marys". And Liats.
I can take you places where they swarm.
Pedophilia does have a specific definition, HuffPo.
This is an interesting discussion.
CurtainCall2 writes:
I just took a look at the script and at Liat's entrance, the stage directions say, "A small figure appears in a doorway, a girl, perhaps seventeen."
There's also some discussion about how old Joe Cable is. He could be as young as 20 or 21.
spidey_882 writes:
I just checked Michner's book (which I've owned forever and, admittedly, have never never gotten around to reading). Liat is described as being "around seventeen years old."
Bloody Mary is 55.
Nellie Forbush is 22.
I'm just skimming through and I haven't found exactly how old Cable is supposed to be, but he describes himself as still being a student at Princeton.
Of course, differences probably exist between the book and musical scripts.
Funniest is user patash, who should audition for the Althouse commentariat:
I'm simply astounded that there is any confusion about her age. It's plain as day. She's younger than springtime!
miss pennywise:
I guess the question for me now is "How young is springtime?" 18?
patash:
It's a little younger than summer, and a whole lot younger than winter.
@BP,
Bali Hai" is in one reading a love song, or rather a song about love as an ideal,
Oh, dude, it's just so much weirder than that. It's like it's one of the first songs about an "acid trip, man". It's "White Rabbit" with coconut palms. Remember, Bloody Mary is addicted to betel nut, so the drug connection is made explicit in the play.
Someday you'll see me floatin' in the sunshine,
My head stickin' out from a low flyin' cloud,
You'll hear me call you,
Singin' through the sunshine,
Sweet and clear as can be:
"Come to me, here am I, come to me."
If you try, you'll find me
Where the sky meets the sea.
"Here am I your special island
Come to me, Come to me."
That's just some strange shit, that is.
YoungHegelian,
Love is weird.
And betel doesnt do that.
@BP,
And betel doesnt do that.
I know that, but who knows what else was in her medicine chest?
However weird Broadway love may be, it isn't "head stickin' out from a low flyin' cloud" weird. "Your special island" "where the sky meets the sea" is Heaven & it is the Angel of Death whose head one sees in the "low flyin cloud". When Death does come for you:
"You'll hear me call you,
Singin' through the sunshine,
Sweet and clear as can be:
"Come to me, here am I, come to me."
Being 20 and overseas at war with a suicidal fighting to the death enemy does bring emotions to mate to the surface.
Nellie could wash that French man out of her hair, but Joe saw Liat as his last chance to love. Not all the Baby Boomer's parents came back alive. Flying fighters over the vast Pacific Ocean was a gamble at best.
"If someone here has any idea of what Bali High is about, I'd love to hear it. That is one weird song. I think it's about death. I also hear echos of "Death & the Maiden" in "Younger Than Springtime", too."
First, it's spelled "Bali Ha'i" (not "High").
Wikipedia says "The name refers to a mystical island, visible on the horizon but not reachable, and was originally inspired by the sight of Ambae island from neighboring Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, where author James Michener was stationed in World War II.... The troops think of Bali Ha’i as an exotic paradise, but it is off-limits — except to officers. The matriarch of Bali Ha’i, Bloody Mary, conducts a lot of business with the troops, and she meets Lt. Joseph Cable right after he arrives. She sings to him her mysterious song 'Bali Ha’i,' with its haunting orchestral accompaniment, because she wants to entice him to visit her island. She doesn’t tell him that she wants him to meet, and fall in love with, her young daughter, Liat.
"In his memoir, The World Is My Home (1992), Michener writes of his time in the Treasury Islands: 'On a rude signboard attached to a tree, someone had affixed a cardboard giving the settlement's name, and it was so completely different from ordinary names, so musical to my ear that I borrowed a pencil and in a soggy notebook jotted the name against the day when I might want to use if for some purpose I could not then envisage: Bali-ha'i.'"
Most people live on a lonely island,
Lost in the middle of a foggy sea.
Most people long for another island,
One where they know they will like to be.
Bali Ha'i may call you,
Any night, any day,
In your heart, you'll hear it call you:
"Come away...Come away."
Bali Ha'i will whisper
In the wind of the sea:
"Here am I, your special island!
Come to me, come to me!"
Your own special hopes,
Your own special dreams,
Bloom on the hillside
And shine in the streams.
If you try, you'll find me
Where the sky meets the sea.
"Here am I your special island
Come to me, Come to me."
So, it's about getting pulled out of your normal life by a mysterious call, but the call is to exotic sexuality. It seems very similar to the Sirens in Greek mythology. In that context, the sailors are drawn by the call to their death. And Cable does die in "South Pacific."
I hear you singing in the wire
I can hear you thru the whine
And the Wichita lineman
Is still on the line
"By the way the character in the story, Marine Lieutenant Joe Cable, loves the woman, who is Tonkinese, but — spoiler alert — rejects her because of racism and, out of dramatic necessity, dies in battle."
I don't know what they did with it in the movie, but that's not the way I remember the book. He doesn't "reject her out of racism". He realizes that his wealthy Philadelphia family would never accept her -- he imagines introducing her to his Mother -- but he falls in love with her, and does more than kiss her on TV. And as I recall, he leaves because he is a lieutenant in the god-damned Army, and there is this war going on that requires his attention.
The next we know is when a guy is tending the grass in a fresh graveyard on some tropical isle, rows and rows of white crosses. One of them says "Lt. Joe Cable".
Great book, I'll have to read it again.
Sorry, Marines.
From a 2010 review of a production of "SP": "... Cable... delivering a gorgeous, blistering “Younger Than Springtime”, brings to mind vague, troubling hints of pedophilia...."
Last night I was reading a page from Love, Sex, and War by John Costello that talked about the problem pregnant 15 and 16-year-old war brides caused for the towns near transit camps.
I doubt that many girls would have been marrying that young if it weren't for the war, but it obviously wasn't viewed in the same way it is now.
I've performed in the show twice and loathe it, despite some beautiful music. There was a TV remake in 2001 that struggled with trying to bring a modern sensibility to the piece, but with mixed results. Best thing about it is Harry Connick Jr. as Cable. Weirdest thing is Glenn Close, who was in her early 50s at the time, as Nellie. She also produced it. While it was largely praised at the time, it is in its own way as weird and disturbing as the 1958 version. I had a hard time getting past Old Nellie. While the Nellie of the book is 22, she is often played by older actresses: Martin at 27, Gaynor at 34. But 30 years older than as written changes a lot about the believability of the character.
There are any number of Bali Hai's, thousands in fact.
Check out Google maps, from the Singapore Straits to the isles of Tahiti. Every one (well, almost), from sea level looks like an outpost of paradise, and a great number have an imposing mountain with, often, impressive thunderclouds. Many are active volcanos. Nearly all have brown natives, many of whom are young, pretty (I will leave out New Guineans, Solomon Islanders and Micronesians, YMMV), and very female.
And they are reachable. How many times have I approached one on a canoe? I can't count them. It was a familiar sight. I grew up half in paradise, half in a shithole. The two go together more often than not.
And the natives dont care one bit how you transliterate their languages.
If someone here has any idea of what Bali High is about, I'd love to hear it.
Well, I don't know either, but here's the best response and guess about that..
The first time I saw Bali Hai I was a little kid, on a canoe crossing the Mindoro strait, shortly after seeing "South Pacific" on TV.
There it was, thunderhead and all, Mount Halcon over the beaches of Puerto Galera.
When it comes my time to die, as inevitably it must, let me die out of dramatic necessity.
I've lived in places that got on my every last nerve and rubbed like sandpaper agaiinst all my senses. Such places exist. It stands to reason that some place that's just the opposite might exist. I've never encountered the Great Good Place, but it's out there. Bali Ha'i is some fine music to keep you pulling on the oars as you work against the current.
I knew an old guy who had been stationed on Espiritu Santu during those days. I was his caregiver. He said all they did was drink and party, out of boredom. And fuck the natives, too, probably. Fortunately he had brought his ukulele. He was an older officer, lucky to get commissioned after flunking West Point.
He himself was in little danger of combat. Just strafing maybe. He said all his officers came back to the states with enlarged livers and rotten teeth. When he was dying, in 1991, he was getting MS Contin, and he woke in the middle of the night to say a ship had pulled into the harbor and it was full of booze. LOL.
It had been the best time of his life, I think.
Nancy Sinatra in the parlance of the time was a certain "stone cold fox." And from an earlier generation the appelation: "hubba-hubba" would also apply.
Henry said...
So it's sort of like Younger than Springtime for Hitler.
You, Henry, are a bad, bad, man.
And the winner of this thread
I remember Mark Steyn speculating that the reason Sinatra's catalog stays fresh and in the public mind was because his kids adored him and worked to keep his legacy intact while Crosby's not so much..
I think you can see some of that here.
Bill Lee is no Marnie Nixon.
Why didn't you choose One Enchanted Evening? It is better known and its played more often on the radio.
Also, "I am in Love with a Wonderful Guy " is a pretty good number as well.
My other favorites are Bali Hai and "This Nearly Was Mine" would also serve.
I have often heard how well Sinatra could craft a song. This clip certainly shows his expertise.
I often listen to the Sinatra channel on Sirius XM. Second only to the Symphony channel.
I won the Texas state high school spelling contest in 1978 on the word "betel" because of the song "Bloody Mary" from my parents' Broadway cast recording of "South Pacific".
Bloody Mary's chewin' betel nuts!
She is always chewin' betel nuts!
Bloody Mary's chewin' betel nuts,
And she don't use Pepsodent!
So thanks, Bloody Mary. I guess you are the girl I love!
I guess I have a different read of Lt Cable. The issue with him and Liat is CLASS, not caste; he does not have the same problem with skin color as Nellie. He's a Princeton dropout who really does not give a shit about his parents. At that time, the Islands were rife with Ivy League dropouts from the upper castes of society Northeast. So much so, that Nathaniel West lampoons them in Miss Lonely Hearts in the Speak Easy scene.
My old man was such a dropout from Yale, as was Dillion Ripley, the late head of the Smithsonian (and they had a nearly fatal fallout over a "native girl, my father wanted to marry and Ripley wanted his way.) My father lived two years in Tahiti leaving in 1940 when France fell and Vichy was not friendly with Jewish Americans.
This was mandatory screening in our home (first in the theater, then on tv repeatedly). I understood that it was not simply a whore house for officers; but Bloody Mary's description of Bali Hai was of the Polynesian Shangri La, which Professor assigned to us to watch (or at least I did).
I agree 1000% that Lt Joe leaves because of DUTY, which is an extremely important theme in the film and book. War came and Duty called. In that generation, these are real things to be honored. To many, they still are. Unlike Conway, he left but could never return.
There were many like Joe Cable who answered the call of duty and paid the price of liberty. Think of Captain Miller, a former school teacher leading a group of men to rescue the sixth son of a family of fallen sons. Same war on the other side of the world; same story with the same outcome. War. People leave their Bali Hai for the nobility of duty even if the end is ignoble.
Far more problematic is Monsieur. A French plantation owner with a few brown children. The French were not known for being benevolent rulers over their burdens. The France of that period was not the France of today where, of course, racism does not exist.
Nellie's background of the Southern Plantations, where surely she would have known the same sort of breeding issues, should have fit right in. It's the part of the story that I find completely false.
Sinatra is flat on the word "give" at 0:50.
Monsieur is the sort of man who went "East of Suez" where "the best is like the worst, there ain't no ten commandments and a man can raise a thirst".
There was no color bar for them.
Quite a lot of my ancestors fit that description. That was most Europeans in the colonies, for better or worse. Those were the sort of people who conquered in the first place.
There has been some discussion about the meaning of "Bali Ha'i." One recollection I have of "Bali Ha'i" is from a high school yearbook in 1970. It went something like this: "Bali Hai...Velly high!" Which implies that the graduate was a bit of a stoner. Maybe he was, but he went on the Ivy League and then law school. He is now an attorney working as an executive in financial service firms, so his stoner days are long gone.As is his long hair.
"Then there's also the song 'You've got to be taught to hate,' which sets new levels of delusion. No, you don't have to be taught to hate, you have to be taught NOT to hate the out group. The definition of who's in the out group changes, but hatred of the out group is the default"
You do have to be taught to hate the out group...it happens as children are raised by parents who express disdain for others, and picked up from their peers, who are similarly ill-raised. It is not innate, but inculcated, as, how else would children hate the "right" out group?
"Sinatra is flat on the word "give" at 0:50."
You can be sure he intended to be flat on that note.
You can be sure he intended to be flat on that note
Agreed. By all accounts, he did nothing by accident.
Cookie: You do have to be taught to hate the out group...it happens as children are raised by parents who express disdain for others, and picked up from their peers, who are similarly ill-raised. It is not innate, but inculcated, as, how else would children hate the "right" out group?
Wonder how all that "strictly nurture" hostility toward outgroups got started in the first place? Some power-grabber bamboozling the rubes in his hunter-gatherer band into scapegoating those guys on the other side of the river, no doubt. Selection for that trait in an environment of limited resources? Nah, humans never lived under such conditions of scarcity.
Newsweek (or was it Time?) says my babies are racist, so there's that.
The movie is ridiculous.
John Kerr couldn't sing OR act. I have no idea why R&H cast him. No doubt he came cheap.
The Planter-Nellie romance is just as silly. He's rich, he's handsome, he's madly in love with her - but no dice. Because...she's from Little Rock and he has two incredibly cute, young, Polynesian kids from his previous marriage.
Okey-dokey.
Tales of the South Pacific made me realize how tough it was to be stationed in the South Pacific during WW2.
No tropical paradises. Hot, muggy, no AC, insects, tropical diseases, and boring. And of course, no dames.
A lot of men developed skin diseases that never properly healed or caught malaria.
I'm sure the officers had plenty of time to sit around and get drunk. Most of the EM had to work.
Carol: I knew an old guy who had been stationed on Espiritu Santu during those days.
No kidding? I bet he crossed paths with my father.
My father passed on some very interesting stories to me from those days, though the ones I got directly were carefully curated for daughters' hearing. (Some less edifying ones were permitted to my brothers, who promptly passed them on to their sisters.)
I saw it at the Guthrie in Minneapolis a few years ago. Music was great, staging and choreography were outstanding, and the acting was excellent. Never having seen it before, I was surprised by how PC it was given its time period. However, its is really full of memorable songs.
In some ways it is very innocent by modern standards.
Awesome scene. We saw South Pacific at Lincoln Center a few year ago. Younger Than Springtime was sung by Matthew Morrison of Glee, etc. You might think he might be the total package.
https://youtu.be/xYEIOkUyFKg?list=RDxYEIOkUyFKg
"South Pacific" is a marvelous musical. It opened on Broadway in 1949. Its opposition to racial prejudice was pretty advanced for the time. I know some commenters here object to the lesson that prejudice has to be "carefully taught", but my father, a pyschiatrist, used to use those lyrics in talks about prejudice. The point is that (even if there's some element of hard-wiring involved in prejudice) we can overcome our bigotry if we try, and we can try to raise our children to be free of prejudice.
Only a modern-day critic would see pedophilia in Lt. Cable's love for Liat. It's just not there.
I hadn't known that John Kerr didn't do his own singing in the movie. The guy who dubbed it was fine as far as I could tell; sorry Althouse didn't like his voice, but de gustibus. Of course Sinatra was a musical giant, but neither he nor his interpretation of the song would have worked in the play or movie; he was much too sophisticated and much much too old for Lt. Cable (talk about Martin and Gaynor as Nellie!).
I prefer Donovan's Reef.
Sinatra, on a dare, once recorded "Old McDonald Had A Farm" to prove that he could make any song popular. But he was basically a saloon singer. "Younger Than Springtime" wouldn't really be to his strong suit.
Better examples (or worse if you prefer) would have been "Old Man River" or the Soliloquy from Carousel. He should have stayed away from them altogether.
Ok, so I'm going to be that person that comments months late, but such is the nature of the internet. If an article stays up for months or even years, there will always be those who stumble across it at some point when it may be ancient history for the author and for everyone who read it the day it came out, but it is brand-new and comment-worthy for the late commenter. Think Amazon book reviews - the bulk of customer reviews may come within a few months of a book's publication date, but new customer reviews will continue to follow for as long as the book is still available (whether in or out of print).
That being said - I grew up listening to the "South Pacific" soundtrack, read the book, saw the movie, was so entranced with the Liat/Cable romance (never cared much for Nellie, found her somewhat grating) that I wound up marrying a somewhat Cable-like Marine. As dramatic necessity did not do away with him, we eventually divorced, which, frankly, would probably have happened with Cable and Liat, too, had he lived to see her no longer "younger than springtime".
That, actually, is the reason I'm commenting 6 months late here - I've just recently seen the 60th anniversary showing of the movie version, along with my 15-year-old son. (I got him to see it by telling him there was a hot Asian chick, then ruined it right in the middle by telling him she was now 79, haha...although France Nuyen is actually still quite beautiful...Mitzi Gaynor, not so much.) So here's this musical I've loved all my life, but now, unfortunately, I'm seeing it in a different light. I just read (and also late-commented on) a review of a Broadway revival where the reviewer, himself an older gentleman, commented on the musical's bold anti-ageism stance, with one character stating that, as a man in his 40s, he was "by no means through" and remarking how some women prefer a mature man, as witness Nellie's romance with the much older deBecque. Ok, so older men can still play, we get it. But what of older women? The song "Younger Than Springtime", as well as the line about "this is what I've longed for, someone young and smilin'" from "Twin Soliloquies" drive home the point that a woman's value lies in her youth. Bloody Mary, a middle-aged woman, is viewed as repulsive, with the idea of any of the Seabees being legitimately attracted to her seen as ludicrous. Juanita Hall, who was in her 40s when she originated the role on Broadway and in her 50s when she repeated the role in the movie version, was actually quite pretty, hardly a repulsive hag.
I have not seen the 2001 remake with 50-something Glenn Close, but I think I just might seek it out at this point. I kind of like the fact that the producer chose to drop the May-December aspect of the Nellie/deBecque relationship. Maybe it stretches credibility a bit to think of a non-supervisory Navy nurse in her 50s, but mid-30s wouldn't be too much of a stretch, and Close is hardly the only actor or actress to play a character 15 years her junior. I kind of like the thought of an older Nellie, but what I'd really like to see, if there's ever a third (or fourth?) reboot in the works, is a bit more respect for Bloody Mary's character, or have it made clearer that her comic and/or unattractive attributes are based on something other than her having passed her sell-by date as a woman.
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