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Trevor Nunn's trawl through the Broadway blockbusters now brings us up to Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific. But the 51-year-old musical is beginning to show its age, and Nunn's decently dull production has little of the raffish èlan you find in Privates on Parade, which also deals with inter-racial marriage and the camp entertainments of wartime. Nunn's chief problem is that he has invested the story with more realism than it can contain. He gives us documentary war footage, hurtling jeeps, bullets biting the sand, anda lot of sweat-stained shirts.
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Philip Quast as the French planter, with a white streak in his hair that made him the big romantic number, was a resonant passion.
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