April 7
SOUTH PACIFIC DAY
The Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein musical classic of love and war, South Pacific, unfolded on a lush tropical island swarming with Seabees, nurses, natives and coconut trees on this night in 1949. Actually, it was not a tropical island, but the stage of the Majestic Theatre in New York City.
Ezio Pinza starred as the suave French plantation owner with a shady past and Mary Martin portrayed the bubbly, pretty, but naive Navy nurse. Mary Martin washed her hair a zillion times as she sang, I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair in 1,925 performances.
1950 Tony Awards went to the show and its producers, performers, director (Joshua Logan) and composers nine statuettes. It also earned a Pulitzer Prize in the same year and in 1958 was made into a movie.
South Pacific continued to cause a lot of Happy Talk from April 3, 2008, when the show was revived and continued to play to sold-out houses through August 22, 2010 at the Vivian Beaumont/Lincoln Center Theatre in New York City. Seven more Tony Award statuettes were added to the honors bestowed on South Pacific.
Once strangers to the strains of Some Enchanted Evening, audiences across the U.S. were introduced to South Pacific on the small screen in 2010, thanks to PBS.
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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