FOR IMMEDIATE MEDIA RELEASE
Wednesday, July 28, 2010

LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER presents the television premiere of Lincoln Center Theater’s Tony Award-winning production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” airing Wednesday, August 18 at 8 p.m. on WVIZ/PBS, live from the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Lincoln Center Theater’s new production of the musical classic won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical Revival, as well as the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Drama League Award for Best Musical Revival.

Based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Tales of the South Pacific, “South Pacific” features music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. Set on a tropical island during World War II, the musical tells the sweeping romantic story of two couples ― U.S. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush (Kelli O’Hara) and French plantation owner Emile de Becque (Tony Award-winner Paulo Szot), and Navy Airman Joe Cable and a young local native girl, Liat ― and how their happiness is threatened by the realities of the war and by their own prejudices.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific premiered at the Majestic Theatre on April 7, 1949, and went on to enjoy a five-year Broadway run, winning countless awards, including nine Tony Awards (notably for Best Musical) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Considered by many the finest musical ever written, the score includes such musical theater classics as “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Younger Than Springtime,” “Bali Ha’i,” “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” “A Wonderful Guy” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair.”

LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER, now in its 34th broadcast season, has received 13 Emmy Awards, most recently for the broadcast of New York City Opera’s Madama Butterfly. The series has made the world’s greatest artists on Lincoln Center’s renowned stages accessible to home viewers in virtually every corner of the United States. It is the only series of live performing arts telecasts on American television today.