The Wander List

South Pacific ad lights up Times Square.

A theatergoer is overpowered by the TKTS booth.

I’m cheap (or broke, depending on how you look at it). Which means whenever I go to a Broadway show, I plant myself at the TKTS booth all day, buy a half-price ticket for whatever show isn’t sold out, and sit in the back row next to college students and moms from Missouri.

But for my birthday this year, I got two front-row seats to South Pacific, and it was worth every one of my husband’s 30,000 pennies.  We walked to Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater and settled in directly above the orchestra pit – so close to the stage I could have hopped on and treated the audience to my own rendition of I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair complete with time steps and pin curls, had I planned ahead.

As the show began, we were instantly awed. We could hear every note of the piccolo, watch the clarinet player smile between songs, see the actors’ twitches and hear their sighs. Although we gave up the panoramic view, I didn’t miss it. In fact, it would be hard to see a show any other way now. And a word to the penny-pinchers: the front row is cheaper than most middle rows.

South Pacific’s revival turned 1-year-old this month and has unwrapped seven Tonys. The New York Times couldn’t help but beam, despite the seemingly dated storyline. Rogers and Hammerstein based their exploration of love, war and racism on James A. Michener’s book Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction some 60 years ago.