Posted by: Riikka

14 Mar 2007

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According to New York Post, Scarlett is in the running to play Nellie Forbush in a revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center.

Lincoln Center and director Bartlett Sher, who staged the theater’s Tony Award-winning musical The Light in the Piazza last year, have already begun drawing up plans for the January 2008 production.

Reese Witherspoon and Kelli O’Hara (The Pajama Game) are also on Lincoln Center’s wish list. But Johansson is known to be a huge fan of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and her agents have been telling theater producers that she’d love to star in a Broadway show.

In a few weeks, Sher will audition opera singers to play de Becque, the South Seas plantation owner who falls in love with Forbush during World War II.

Dimitri Hvorovstovsky, the hunky Russian tenor, is a likely candidate. Physically, the white-haired tenor would pair very well with the blonde Johansson.

“They want the leads to be sexy,” says a production source. “This is not going to be a stodgy old production of South Pacific. “

Those two roles, among the greatest ever written for the American musical, were played by Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin in the original 1949 Broadway production.

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