Bart Sher on the Dark Side of Happy Talk

Intiman's Bartlett Sher is headed for New York, but he has a heck of a going-away present: the January 29 Seattle opening of his smash revisionist revival South Pacific at the Fifth Avenue.

Sher, who will spend 2010 as Intiman co-director (with his 2011 successor Kate Whoriskey), phoned me last week to talk about South Pacific, the Seattle production of the big hit by the hottest director on both coasts. "It sort of developed a performance tradition concentrating on the happy songs, and the guys missing the girls on the island," says Sher. "We're following the tradition of Josh Logan, the original writer, who also wrote Mister Roberts" — another fact-based South Pacific hit fiction turned Broadway show.

Thomas Heggen, the WWII vet author of the original Mister Roberts novel, killed himself; Logan was a tormented manic-depressive. Sher restores some long-cut text of South Pacific, and more important, the Loganesque dark shading of a famously sunny story. It's not about unearned cockeyed optimism — it's about hope winning out against all odds, despite lingering bitterness. "Bloody Mary's 'Happy Talk' has always been done as sort of quaint — happy. In ours, it's a cover for selling your daughter to get her out of poverty. We make it very clear that's what's going on." 

The real Bloody Mary told James Michener (who wrote the book that became the musical South Pacific) that she planned to go home after WWII to fight colonialism in Vietnam. 

“She’s Vietcong,” says Sher. (So are the troops above, trading a US POW for some VC prisoners in 1973.) Michener once wrote, “I would often think of her [during] Vietnam and I wondered if our leaders realized that the enemy they were fighting consisted of millions of determined people like Bloody Mary." Who knows? Maybe Bloody Mary actually went from selling GIs shrunken heads and grass skirts (and daughters?) to killing them for Uncle Ho. Now ain't that too damn bad?