In 1852 President Millard Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew Perry on an expedition to force an end to Japan’s 220-year-old policy of isolation and to open Japanese ports to American trade, through the use of gunboat diplomacy if necessary.
In 1976 John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s musical Pacific Overtures, which dramatized those efforts, opened on Broadway.
Here is the Original Broadway Cast performing the number “Someone in a Tree” from that show.
Sondheim sets it up:
Commodore Perry and his escorts come ashore and meet with the Japanese Councilors in a treaty house which, as in Kayama’s plan, has been temporarily erected to receive them and which will be destroyed the minute they leave, so that their feet will never have touched sacred Japanese soil. Under the floorboards a samurai warrior crouches, ready to spring up and kill the Americans should anything go wrong. The Reciter deplores the fact that no one knows what was said behind the closed shutters on that historic day. An Old Man enters.
What? You didn’t really expect me to pass up a chance to inject Stephen Sondheim into this series, did you? (Spoiler Alert: It won’t be the last time!)
Sondheim fans continually point to this song and claim that it is “well known” that it was Sondheim’s favorite of all those that he wrote, but the truth was a bit more complicated, as Sondheim wrote:
When I’m asked to name my favorite song of those I’ve written, an understandable but unanswerable request, I often proffer this one. I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyric, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form. That ambitious invention was John Weidman’s.
The song is a distillation of a five-page scene he wrote, too long to include here. I have often taken dialogue passages from book writers and musicalized them, examples of which will surface in volume two in the chapters on Sunday in the Park with George and Evening Primrose. Suffice it to say that this song comes the closest to the heart of Pacific Overtures: historical narrative as written by a Japanese who’s seen a lot of American musicals.
Anyway, other than that, Millard Fillmore was a mediocre president.