GRAND RAPIDS -- "Some Enchanted Evening" is a powerful song. Just ask opera baritone Jason Howard, who will be singing it this week when Broadway Grand Rapids brings South Pacific to DeVos Performance Hall.

Conductor, pianist and songwriter Lawrence Goldberg says the current production of the musical South Pacific, now playing at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, is truer to the original theatrical production than the 1958 movie.

Nellie Forbush, the heroine of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, comes from Little Rock, Ark. Mary Martin, who created the role back in 1949 came, famously, from Texas. So does Carmen Cusack who, in the wonderful production that’s just arrived in Toronto, gives a performance of Nellie that I doubt Martin herself could have equalled and on which I cannot believe that anybody could improve.

It’s poetic that Jason Howard hooked up with the love of his life across a crowded room.

The charismatic, sculpted Welsh-born baritone who plays Emile de Becque in the current Dancap production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific smiles as he recalls the enchanted evening in 1994 when a friend dragged him to a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert, then to the post-concert reception where he met his future wife.

As the curator of any fine-arts museum knows, stripping away years of built-up sediment and grime in restoring a work to its original glory can be a two-edged sword.