South Pacific: the uncut version - A Tony-winning staging of the great musical takes South Pacific back to its moral origins.

By Rupert Christiansen

8:00AM BST 13 Aug 2011

The Telegraph - UK.

'You want the Waiting for Godot version of South Pacific?" says director Bartlett Sher. "Well, this is it." And he's only half joking, because his staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical masterpiece, first seen at New York's Lincoln Center in 2008, is based on a set consisting of little more than a Beckettian sand dune and a single palm tree: the effect, he says, being to make the atmosphere "mysterious and cinematic".

Nor is Joshua Logan's script played for cheap laughs, or camp fun. Having researched deep into the hinterland of its subject-matter – the American navy's encounter with Polynesian culture during the Second World War – Sher treats the show not just as a tune-stuffed romp but as a social and moral drama with something urgent to say.

Yet that doesn't mean that the joy has been bleached out. Audiences across the United States have been ecstatic and the critics have raved, too.

Charles Spencer saw the show at the Lincoln Center and reported that it "surges with musical delight, sexy comedy and thematic seriousness", the Washington Post called it "the best Rodgers and Hammerstein in a generation" and even the notoriously hard-to-please Ben Brantley of The New York Times was unmanned. "I know we're not supposed to expect perfection in this imperfect world," he admitted, "but I'm darned if I can find one serious flaw in this production."

Now, through the agency of the Ambassador Theatre Group, Sher's version of South Pacific is coming to Britain, starting a six-month tour with a summer season at the Barbican in London.

PHOTO: Paulo Szot and Samantha Womack hope to repeat the success of South Pacific.