This was published 11 years ago
Dark side to enchanted setting of island classic
Audiences are about to discover there's a lot more to South Pacific than grass skirts and coconuts.
By Steve Dow
Satirist, singer-songwriter and TV star Eddie Perfect learnt his lesson on the first day of the South Pacific rehearsal this week: stand close to Teddy Tahu Rhodes only when he's acting, not when he sings.
"Your voice should come with some sort of warning system that you need to be a certain distance away," the Melbourne-born Perfect jokes with the New Zealand-born baritone.
Tahu Rhodes's arrestingly deep, loud bass is normally applied to Brahms or Schubert or Handel's Messiah, rather than the songbook of Rodgers and Hammerstein's greatest musical.
While the 45-year-old will be doing the heavy lifting vocally, singing 10 songs, his first Broadway-style musical is a snug fit voice-wise: his character, the plantation owner Emile de Becque, was written with an opera singer in mind.
Confronting the uncomfortable truth about racial prejudice … baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Eddie Perfect star in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.Credit: Jacky Ghossein
"The acting part of the gig is the new challenge, because in opera I very rarely get to say anything," says the tall but earthy Tahu Rhodes, debriefing with Perfect in Opera Australia's Surry Hills rehearsal room before the show's four-week run in Sydney, which will be followed by a 10-week run in Melbourne.
"This is like a new field for me: it's interesting with accent as well, because I'm playing a French man, so there's a whole different layer to it."
Opera Australia often programs a musical in the Sydney mid-winter, but South Pacific signals artistic director Lyndon Terracini's switch from the usual operettas - ''too daggy and too old-fashioned'', says one Opera Australia insider - to catering for the taste in Broadway-styles, and is the first of several such joint productions with producer John Frost, though subsequent musicals have not yet been announced.
More immediately, has Perfect, 34, star of the TV drama Offspring and creator and star of stage shows such as Misanthropology and Shane Warne The Musical - but who likewise has never tackled a Broadway show before - any acting tips for the debonair leading opera man Tahu Rhodes?
"He hasn't given me any yet, but I'll be asking for some," says the baritone cheerfully.
"Always get a Cabcharge; that's the first rule," suggests Perfect with mock concern, making his co-star laugh.
"The second rule is: just because it's free, doesn't mean you have to eat it. That's pretty much all you need to know."
In the event Tahu Rhodes needs some tips on how to belt out a power ballad, Perfect says these are the rules: "Just clench your fists, close your eyes and always get off your stool during the key change."
Perfect plays Luther Billis, who doesn't sing so much in South Pacific as provide comic relief as the smooth operator, ex-used car salesman figure, running an island racket.
In Act II, Perfect as Billis must dress in a blonde wig, grass skirt and coconut shell bra to become Honey Bun because, well, there's nothing like a dame.
Perfect once dressed in fishnet stockings to play an all-singing Alexander Downer in Keating! - the Musical. How does the comedian view drag?
"I don't know whether there's something sub-conscious going on, but I've managed to be nude or in drag for everything I've done, and since I've written a lot of them, I've only got myself to blame. Just because I've got really good legs, people try to exploit me. I'm really over it."
These two performers have come from afar - Tahu Rhodes spends as much time in New York or in Europe as he does in Sydney these days, such is the international demand for his vocal chops in operas such as Carmen or A Streetcar Named Desire.
Whichever city he goes to for a production, Tahu Rhodes likes to "immerse" himself in one local spot, find a good gym and cafe and settle into a neighbourhood during a show's run.
Last weekend, Perfect strapped his surfboard to the roof of the car and drove up the Hume Highway from Melbourne to Sydney, transplanting his wife and two young children to this city for South Pacific's initial run.
Upon arrival, the surreal sight of an open-air ice-skating rink at Bondi beach confronted him.
For all his deadpan humour, Perfect locates something serious in South Pacific the musical, which in decades past riled southern US legislators for its promotion of inter-racial relationships.
"I think it would be erroneous to think Australians are going to see a show which is about people confronting their prejudices about race and just sit there going, 'Well, we don't have any [prejudice], we can't relate to that in any way at all'," Perfect says.
"Every culture has its fear of the other: you don't have to look any further than the front page of the newspapers at the moment to see we're having a hard time dealing with asylum seekers; we have a really chequered history with our indigenous population, and this show deals with all those things, and I think audiences will find there is a huge amount they can relate to in terms of race."
If that sounds like Perfect's thinking aloud, he is: he reveals he's writing a "ridiculously ambitious" new musical set from 1788 to 1792, dealing with the First Fleet and indigenous Australians.
But first, grass skirts in the South Pacific wait to be filled.
South Pacific is at the Opera House from August 8.