The Sweetgreen salads had barely been distributed when the tears started.
The actress Loretta Ables Sayre reached for a tissue she had tucked away for precisely such a moment. “I just keep it stuck in my bra,” she said. “Because we’ve just been weeping and sobbing, you know?”
On Sunday afternoon, five of the principal cast members of the 2008 Broadway revival of “South Pacific,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical love story set in the Pacific theater of World War II, broke for lunch in the basement of the Lincoln Center Theater. Sitting around a table in a small rehearsal studio, a piano and a coat rack practically its only other occupants, they — along with virtually all of the original cast and orchestra from the show’s 2008 run — were in the middle of the fourth and final full day of rehearsal before a stripped-down performance of the show on Monday.
The event was a benefit gala for Lincoln Center Theater, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. A spokeswoman for the theater declined to share how much the event raised.
The production, which earned seven Tony Awards, represented a turning point for Lincoln Center, jump-starting a run of well-regarded revivals of Golden Age musicals, like “The King and I” and “My Fair Lady,” directed by Bartlett Sher.
In the 16 years since it opened, its cast members have welcomed children and Tonys, landed shiny television jobs and gotten married. And in the time-honored tradition of theater folk, the emotions were never far from the surface.
“We all know this is the last time that this entire cast is going to be together to do this,” Mrs. Sayre said. “It’s the last time because people move on, and lives change, and people get incredibly successful and do other things.”
“It’s a homecoming,” she said, “so we’re all trying to soak in every minute.”
As at any reunion — high school, college, family — credit must be given to the participant who traveled the greatest distance to be there. This week, that distinction goes to Mrs. Sayre, who lives in Hawaii. (She arranged for leis from Honolulu to be delivered to the cast, crew and orchestra members.)
Despite the years and distance, the castmates have made efforts to stay in touch. Several described keeping tabs via social media, and trying to catch one another’s shows when they were in town. Appreciation was expressed for Christmas cards.
(Kelli O’Hara, a Lincoln Center mainstay who was recently in “Days of Wine and Roses” on Broadway and “The Hours” at the Met, was newly married at the time of the “South Pacific” run, and Mrs. Sayre greeted her on set as “Mrs. Naughton,” an affectionate bit that the two still keep up in their correspondence.)
“Every single time that you see them on TV doing something, getting awards or doing a show, you just explode with pride,” Mrs. Sayre said. “It’s like watching family. So even though I’ve been so far away, just watching and seeing what they’ve been doing makes me incredibly proud.”
Of course, reunions are also for making introductions. Ms. O’Hara was pregnant with her first child during the show. “I can’t wait for him to see it,” she said. “He was just bouncing around in my belly during all of it.”
Borderline debilitating nostalgia notwithstanding, the main question hanging over the performers, with just over 24 hours left until curtain: Can we even do it anymore?
Li Jun Li, who played the young Tonkinese woman Liat, found that after hundreds of performances — even 16 years later — the choreography “came right back.”
“It’s all in our muscle memory,” she said. “When the bell rings, you know how long you have before you have to go back onstage again. These little things still kind of stay in your body.”
On this point, there was some dissent.
“It just doesn’t come back to my body,” Matthew Morrison said with a laugh. Being out of the grind of doing eight shows a week had left him less than confident that he would be able to hit all the notes the way he did when he was 29, and on the cusp of TV stardom with a new show called “Glee.”
To Paulo Szot, who won that the 2008 Tony for best actor in a musical for his portrayal of Emile de Becque, a lonely Frenchman in exile, the reunion was about “something bigger” than trying to reproduce what they had done in the past.
“It’s not the same, you know?” he said. “Things change, the body changes, the voice changes, the way you sing changes. And that’s OK.”
But time can play havoc with much more than vocal cords and creaky joints. For Ms. O’Hara, slipping back into character as the winsome Navy nurse Nellie Forbush wasn’t a purely frictionless experience.
Returning to the material, Ms. O’Hara found Nellie’s racist impulses, including her knee-jerk revulsion upon learning that her paramour had children with a Polynesian woman, difficult to play. In 2008, she recalled, she was able to muster more empathy for the young woman from Little Rock, Ark. That has become more difficult.
“When I was younger, I could just let her almost seem dingy,” she said of her character. “You can forgive a person, maybe, if they were. But she’s not stupid. And that’s the point.”
Her double cartwheel, though, was a different story.
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