Carmen Cusack’s is some enchanted ensign in ‘South Pacific’

Carmen Cusack’s showbiz career did not begin in the South Pacific, but there were definitely oceans involved.

Cusack, currently winning rave reviews playing “cockeyed optimist” Nellie Forbush in the touring production of Lincoln Center’s “South Pacific” at the Ahmanson Theatre, began her professional life as a cruise ship performer.

It wasn’t technically her first paying gig: Cusack, born in Colorado and raised in Alabama and Texas, was 5 when the pastor of her church coaxed her to belt out her signature song, “Amazing Grace,” by offering her a chocolate bar.

“I’ll never forget this — the pastor asked me if I wanted the accompanist to accompany me, and I pulled him down to my level and said: ‘No thank you, sir, she might mess up,’” Cusack said with a delighted grin during a recent conversation in her dressing room at the Ahmanson.

Still there’s more to Cusack’s performance as Navy Ensign Forbush than this kind of bouncy confidence might suggest. Bartlett Sher, who directed this production of “South Pacific,” finds Cusack to be the perfect Nellie precisely because she is able to combine the dark and the light of the character.

“Her phrasing on ‘Cockeyed Optimist’ is better than anyone’s, including [original Broadway cast member] Mary Martin,” Sher said. “It’s always done like saluting the flag, big and cheery — well, nobody was optimistic in 1942; it was wartime. The song is about, we are really in terrible trouble, but we are going to be OK.” (Noted Cusack: “She is a nurse in the middle of a war zone; it doesn’t have to be this twee little perky-perky song.”)

Critics have echoed Sher’s assessment. Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote that Cusack’s performance “transcends Kelli O’Hara, who was one of the key sources of radiance in the original Lincoln Center Theater production.” Wrote Variety’s Robert Hofler: “No airhead ingénue, Carmen Cusack begins as an especially patrician Ensign Nellie Forbush — think Celeste Holm in her early movie days — but quickly delivers the requisite all-American gee-whiz/can-do ethic in her country and western-flavored delivery of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics.”

It’s Cusack’s down-home sassy charm you notice first — including an authentic Southern twang — when she performs her signature songs. But later she brings surprising emotional resonance to Nellie’s sometimes less appealing traits.

Said operatic baritone Rod Gilfry, who stars opposite Cusack on this leg of the tour as her French love interest, Emile de Becque: “She is born to act — it comes to her so naturally, so easily; she is so spontaneous.... I’ve done some 200 performances with her and she’s always there; it’s always fresh, it’s always new.”

She didn’t miss the boat

Cusack’s cruise gig came along at just the right time in 1992. She was working as a singing waitress in Fort Worth and wondering where the money was going to come from to complete her education at the University of North Texas.

Friends coaxed her to tag along to an audition for cruise ship performers being held in Dallas — she got a job offer on the spot. She toured the world, eventually landing in London.

“I married the jazz pianist from the cruise ship, that’s why I ended up in England,” Cusack confessed — a move that also explains her unusual accent, which drifts between British teatime and a down-home Texas barbecue. “I was very young, and the marriage didn’t last, but the career just kept going.”

In London, Cusack portrayed Christine Daae in “Phantom of the Opera” — although she says the ingénue role was always a little too pure and sweet for a Texas tomboy. And after “Phantom,” Cusack began what would develop into 14-year stint in London’s West End with a role in “Les Miserables.” In 2007, casting directors for “Wicked” discovered her in London, and cast her as wicked witch Elphaba, the Green Girl, in the Chicago production of “Wicked.”

“Then this,” said Cusack, gesturing around herself at the backstage chaos of her dressing room. “When they called me to audition for ‘South Pacific,’ I kind of laughed, because I thought, I’m just an Elphaba…. It’s a part you can really sink your teeth into, especially since ‘Wicked’ was so sung-through — this part is more dialogue and less heavy singing.”

Sher said he also pushed hard for Cusack to embody the racism that threatens to undo Nellie’s romance with Emile, who has two children with a Polynesian woman. “It was a racist culture — I was surprised by how hard I wanted to push her in that direction,” Sher said.

In her attempt to understand Nellie’s complacency about segregation in its historical context, Cusack called upon her experiences with segregation while growing up in the South.

Born to teenage parents — her mom was 16, her father, 15 — Cusack spent her formative years with her grandparents in rural Alabama while her mom finished school. “My first real memories of school are that it was an all-black school, and I was the only white girl, and no one would hang out with me,” she said. “At playtime, I played by myself, and it wasn’t like it bothered me; I was comfortable in my own company.

“I had very long hair, down to my bum,” said Cusack, whose straight, feathered dark hair, now cut short, looks nothing like Nellie Forbush’s blond waves. “There would always be a little gathering of the little girls, and they would start braiding my hair; that was my first memory of feeling affection from anyone besides my mother and my grandparents, and to this day, I love to have my hair touched.

“We never spoke, but we had that bond,” Cusack added. “For the role, I just tried to bring myself to that place, and not question it — it was just accepted.”

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