Musical race motifs chime with the times

SOME enchanted evening, theatregoers will experience a not-so-distant era of war zones, racial intolerance and great music

Lisa McCune and Teddy Tahu Rhodes

SOME enchanted evening, theatregoers will experience a not-so-distant era of war zones, racial intolerance and great music.

Feelgood movie The Sapphires opens in cinemas today after making a splash at the Cannes film festival last May. The story of an Aboriginal girl group -- soulful and sequinned like The Supremes -- is set during the Vietnam War and the growing movement for indigenous rights in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, Opera Australia is presenting a revival of the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, set during World War II and with a theme, confronting at the time, of mixed-race relationships.

In the musical, US navy nurse Nellie Forbush is a "cockeyed optimist" from Little Rock who must confront her prejudices about race. "She believes it has been born in her, a quite ingrained racism," said Lisa McCune, who is playing the role. "It's an interesting part of the story because the man she has fallen in love with has Polynesian children."

Opera singer Teddy Tahu Rhodes plays Emile de Becque, Nellie's love interest.

"Emile believes (racism) is something which is not born in you," Rhodes said. "He is adamant about it."

OA is presenting the 2008 production directed by Bartlett Sher and staged at the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York. The local cast also features Eddie Perfect (Luther Billis), Kate Ceberano (Bloody Mary) and Daniel Koek as Lieutenant Cable.

The show opens on Saturday at the Sydney Opera House and runs for a month, before transferring to Melbourne's Princess Theatre from September 13.

OA artistic director Lyndon Terracini said it marked the beginning of musical co-productions for the company. Commercial producer John Frost shares a production credit on South Pacific but Terracini said OA carried the risk in the Sydney season. "In the same way that we are developing some international partnerships with operas that we are producing, I want to do that with musicals too," he said.

Ted Chapin, head of the US-based Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation, said the creators' message of racial tolerance was "bitterly resented" by some audiences in the 1940s. "They thought they were being preached at."