Tales of The South Pacific - Musical Adaptation: South Pacific

Musical Adaptation: South Pacific

The highly successful musical play South Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein, which opened on Broadway on April 7, 1949, was based on the stories in Tales of the South Pacific. In particular, the stories used were "Fo' Dollah", about Bloody Mary, Liat, and Lieutenant Cable; and "Our Heroine", about Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque.

Characters from the stories were merged and simplified to serve the format of the musical. For example, while the coastwatcher in the musical was portrayed as an American Marine (Lt. Cable) assisted by an expatriate French plantation owner (Emile de Becque), in the original story ("The Remittance Man"), the coastwatcher was an English expatriate assisted by native islanders. This coastwatcher in the original short story is a disembodied voice on a short-wave radio, and is never seen by the other characters in the story until his head is found impaled on a stake by a search-and-rescue party. The character of Emile de Becque in the short story has eight mixed-race illegitimate daughters by four different women, none of whom he married, when he meets the nurse Ensign Nellie Forbush. In the musical, he has two legitimate mixed-race children by a woman whom he had married and who had died.