'South Pacific' tour created with 'love and respect'

NEW YORK CITY — A keystone of the Golden Age of Musicals, the Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece “South Pacific” was lavishly revived on Broadway in 2008 — winning a record-setting seven Tony Awards and called “rapturous” by the New York Times.

The national tour, playing the Capitol Theatre Jan. 3-8, is under the direction of Sarna Lapine, who helped mount the Lincoln Center revival as assistant director.

“Every single person who has worked on this show in whatever capacity has had so much love and respect for this production,” said Lapine, interviewed by phone from a Times Square eatery. “Across the board, our goal has been to remount this touring show with that spirit and bring it to as many people as possible.”

The Broadway revival was directed by Tony-winner Bartlett Sher, one of the most original and exciting directors in American theater. Lapine has been Sher’s go-to assistant since his lauded 2006 “Awake and Sing!” staging.

“The show that’s touring is really in keeping with the design, spirit and staging of the Broadway revival as much as we could. All the designers, creative team and myself, we all worked on the revival as associates,” Lapine explained. “We’ve been with the show for four years.”

One of her assignments from Sher was to research the time period of the Pacific campaign, with Lapine becoming the unofficial on-site historian.

“It was really important to try and imagine what it was like to be a young man or young woman growing up in America through the Depression and becoming a teenager or young adult at the outset of World War II,” she said.

“It was important to steep ourselves in that time period. You didn’t travel so much and certainly you didn’t have the access that we have to other parts of the world, or even other parts of the country. So to go off to the South Pacific was an incredible adventure. There was no sort of virtual way to prepare a person for that as there is now.”

Lapine guided the tour’s leads — Katie Reid in the Nellie Forbush role and Marcelo Guzzo as Emile de Becque — as they stepped into the roles created by the Tony-winning opera star Paulo Szot and Kelli O'Hara, nominated for three Tonys and the darling of Broadway musicals.