Paulo Szot is a Brazilian operatic baritone singer and actor. He made his opera debut in 1997 and his international career has included performances with the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala di Milano, Opera de Paris, Bayerische Staatsoper, Opera Australia, Liceo de Barcelona, among many others. In 2008, he made his Broadway debut as Emile De Becque in a revival of South Pacific, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Theatre World Award. In 2012 he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for best actor in a musical, and in 2014 was nominated for the MAC Award for best Celebrity Artist becoming the first Brazilian to receive such honors. In 2022, he originated the role of "Lance" in the hit Broadway musical & Juliet.

South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Michener's work that would be financially successful and, at the same time, send a strong progressive message on racism.