Cable meets a Tonkinese woman called Bloody Mary (Beatriz Abella), who introduces him to her daughter, Liat. marine who has been assigned to scout the movements of the Japanese on a neighboring island. The story spotlights the internal conflict of an American nurse, Nellie Forbush (Stephanie Jones), as she struggles to accept the mixed-race children of her newfound love, French plantation owner Emile De Becque (Don Matthews).
“This is a very relevant message to what is happening right now,” says director Daniel Stephens, who has been involved with Camelot Theatre for twelve years and worked with Oregon Shakespeare Festival for nine seasons. As military allies make an island-hopping push toward Japan, two love stories unfold that will address the question of whether love of an individual can be stronger than conditioned derision of a group. Showing November 30 through January 8 at Camelot Theatre in Talent, it is a story of love impeded by prejudice, set during World War II on a fictional island in the South Pacific.īased on the 1947 novel Tales of the South Pacific by American author James Michener, the story pulls from real-life experiences and characters that Michener encountered while stationed in the Treasury Islands during the war.
That’s why the South Pacific musical, composed in 1949 by Rogers & Hammerstein, is still relevant today, 67 years later. Prejudice and racism have been a hot topic this year, and every year, really, since humans began arbitrarily deciding that certain features or lineages made them superior to others.