'South Pacific' still a day at the beach

April 27, 2008 It's amazing when you think about it that the two best "new" musicals on the Broadway boards this season have been part of our American theater culture since before Leonardo DiCaprio, Uma Thurman and Brad Pitt were even born. "Gypsy," now wowing them at the St. James with Patti LuPone, made its initial Broadway debut in 1959, the same year Simon Cowell, Hugh Laurie and Renee Fleming first wailed in a bassinet. The original production of "South Pacific," now in its first Broadway revival at the Vivian Beaumont in Lincoln Center, opened exactly 10 years earlier in 1949 but is so beautifully done in its current incarnation that it could have been created in January -- if, that is, songwriters of today were penning songs as melodic as Rodgers and Hammerstein did in their time with determined regularity.

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