The ideal summer-musical matchup might’ve been Footloose and Fancy Free, the great Leonard Bernstein/Jerome Robbins dance sequence that was quickly expanded into the 1940s Broadway hit On the Town. But when it comes to immersing yourself in the pleasures of old Broadway musicals, Footloose and South Pacific work nicely, too. American period pieces from very different periods, these two evergreens offer 21^st century audiences a tasty bit of nostalgia and an uneasily lurking reminder that, culturally, there’s not much new under the sun.

South Pacific, which is getting a solid revival through Aug. 25 at Clackamas Repertory Theatre, is a curious blend of old-fashioned Broadway razzmatazz and earnest postwar proselytizing that not so long ago seemed dated yet now, with the American and global resurgence of cynical race-baiting for political gain, seems to have found its time again. Footloose, which is getting a knockout (and sold out) revival through Sept. 1 at Broadway Rose, combines good old-fashioned teen rebellion and a catchy ’80s backbeat with the vision of a closed-in theocratic society a bit like Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, and … oops: Here it comes again.

Whenever we watch or read anything we call a “classic” we view it through at least two sets of eyes: the prism of its own times, and the inevitable immersion in ours. Especially if we’re clinging to a belief in slow but steady social progress, it can be humbling to realize that often the distance between the two isn’t so very far at all.

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SOUTH PACIFIC AT CLACKAMAS REP

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What: that old thing again? Absolutely – you can’t keep a good show, or a superb set of songs, down. First and foremost “that old thing” has those seductive Rodgers & Hammerstein songs, still-hummable hits seven decades later: Some Enchanted Evening, There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame, Bali Ha’i, I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair, Younger than Springtime, Honey Bun, This Nearly Was Mine. The show’s brash, comic, yearning, sentimental score is a cavalcade of musical Americana, the heart and soul of any South Pacific, and still reason enough, after all these years, for any revival.

Yet South Pacific, which debuted on Broadway in 1949 and is based loosely on James Michener’s post-war book of stories Tales from the South Pacific, is more than a score. It’s a snapshot of the American mind at a particular time, just after World War II and on the cusp of the Civil Rights Movement, whose emerging ideas, some of them shaken loose by an insular nation’s growing awareness during the war years of the perils and possibilities of the world at large, were in the air.

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