South Pacific<\/a><\/em> at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont with trepidation.\u00a0I had known the music from the original cast album, starring Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, for going on six decades and was worried that I’d be unable to accept anyone else.\u00a0I never imagined that it would be the conducting that would deep-six this highly praised revival.\u00a0From the first notes, I leaned forward in disbelief that Richard Rodgers’s gorgeous melodies could be rendered so inexpressively, so metronomically.\u00a0“They’re just warming up,” I told myself.\u00a0“They’ll relax when the singers chime in.”\u00a0But no, this guy\u2014Fred Lassen, by name\u2014compromised everything to the very end.<\/span><\/p>\nThe two leads, Laura Osnes (Nellie) and Paulo Szot (de Becque), were actually not bad, and struggled valiantly to escape their conductorial straitjacket.\u00a0It wasn’t difficult to imagine how much better they could have been with a sympathetic leader.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut Bartlett Sher’s direction was offputting too.\u00a0All of the American characters just seemed angry, especially Billis (Danny Burstein) and Cable (Andrew Samonsky).\u00a0“There Is Nothing Like a Dame” was misogynistic, not affectionate.\u00a0A couple of G.I.s ran bare-assed from the shower (but no nurses?) to titters from the audience.\u00a0 Sure, war is hell and bigotry is bad, but R&H aren’t Sondheim or Heggie.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd then there was the amplification.\u00a0On the credit side, I could understand every word, many of which are smudged by the original cast.\u00a0On the debit side, the singers must scale themselves to the machine: not too loud, not too soft, and always<\/em> under control\u2014in other words, with no truly emotional response to the music.\u00a0Some 30 years ago, one Christmas night, I saw Hello, Dolly<\/em> with Ethel Merman.\u00a0She seemed subdued in the first act, but after intermission she stepped in front of the microphones for one of her songs and pinned me to the back of my last-row orchestra seat.\u00a0Now that’s<\/em> theater, never to be forgotten.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAlso unforgettable is the current Tony-winning revival of Hair<\/em>, which has energy galore.\u00a0Amplification may be inimical to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s warm-hearted inspirations, but it’s a necessary element in this great rock score.\u00a0 It’s as unpretentious and true to the original as Sher’s 21st<\/sup> -century view of South Pacific<\/em> is not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n