“English has always been the language whose sound I like best. Except for Russian.”
— Stephen Sondheim

Pacific Overtures was the first Sondheim show that I saw in its original Broadway production. I caught it on the June 26, 1976, matinee, which was the day before it closed after 193 performances.

There was a woman of a certain age sitting next to me in my balcony seat, and during intermission we got to talking. She wanted to know why I decided to see the show, and I explained that it was because I had become a Sondheim fan and I wanted to see this show before it closed. She approached it from a different point of view. She had traveled extensively in Japan and knew a lot about their culture. I wish I could recall more of what was said on that occasion. I was younger then.

I enjoyed the performance for the most part, but perhaps somewhere around the middle of the second act I lost the thread. Of course, I bought the recording, and I loved the score, but I remember telling folks at the time that while I thought there was a lot to admire in the show, in the book, in the staging, in the performances, in the music and lyrics, it just didn’t all work for me. Sondheim had described it as a show about ideas, and perhaps that was it. It just didn’t resonate emotionally with me. Even in the first act, when there was a suicide, the kabuki style of the performance had kept the characters at such a distance, it was difficult to care. At least for me.

So although I could say that I admired many things about the show, I just didn’t love it the way I did other Sondheim shows.

The conceit of the show is that some imaginary Japanese playwright has come to America and seen a few Broadway musicals, then he has gone back to Japan and written a musical about the westernization of Japan that combines both Broadway musical forms and ideas along with Japanese kabuki theater. The original production used all Asian actors, and until the final scene, where the westernization is complete, all male actors taking female roles, just as in kabuki theater. The show is also something like 80 to 90% historically accurate, using actual historical characters, though it does take a few liberties here and there, most notably in the “Chrysanthemum Tea” number which is entirely fictional, but also extremely entertaining.

John Weidman revised his book over the years and made it more about the people and less about the ideas, but he also deleted the rickshaw scene which was one that I really liked. Perhaps he thought it was too preachy.

I wrote about David and Charlotte coming to Philadelphia. What I didn’t mention is that they were here to see the Arden’s production of Pacific Overtures. I had seen it and enjoyed it, but when David asked me about it, I told him that I wasn’t sure if it was good enough to travel all the way from Connecticut to see it.

In the event, they came, they saw, and they loved it. Much more than I had. You see, it’s among David’s favorite Sondheim shows.

 

So when I call it a problem play, it’s only a problem play for me. And not really that much of a problem, really.

A few days ago when I saw that there was an enhanced version of the Original Broadway production now available on YouTube, I wondered whether I wanted to watch it or not. Was I really in the mood for Pacific Overtures?

Well, it couldn’t hurt, I thought. If I start it, I don’t have to finish it.

I watched the whole thing and thoroughly enjoyed it.

And here’s the thing. I often complain about Harold Prince and his overblown staging, but in this show I think he got it right.

So if I seem perhaps a bit ambivalent about Pacific Overtures, maybe a little regretful-happy, that’s actually a rather Sondheimian emotion to feel.

But I’m not ambivalent about the music, certainly not about the song “Poems”. I think it’s a delight.

Kayama hurries home with Manjiro (who has visited America) to his wife, Tamate. To pass the time on the long journey, the men decide to exchange poems, which they make up as they go along.

Writing about his “Less is more” principle, Sondheim had this to say:

… I encountered a threefold Japanese screen at a Metropolitan Museum exhibition. Each panel was about six feet high and two feet across. The left panel-a third of the total surface space-was blank, completely white; the middle one was the same, except for the end of a small tree branch snaking its way shyly from the right-hand border toward the middle of the whiteness; the panel on the right from which the branch grew was filled with a luxuriant tree, extravagantly plumaged birds nested in the branches. It was like a sudden explosion; it seemed to grow as I looked at it. Even if read from right to left, as the Japanese do, it was an explosion followed by its aftermath. The effect was magical-largely because, as with so much japanese art, what was omitted was as important as what was there. In fact, it was the emptiness of almost two thirds of the total screen which made the other third so powerful. I found myself actually moved by an idea I had so long merely acknowledged. I had heard “Less Is More” propounded in its bite-size axiomatic form innumerable times over the years and had watched it operating triumphantly in work like E. B. White’s and Nathanael West’s, but it was Pacific Overtures and an immersion in Japanese culture that breached the blood-brain barrier for me and changed my intellectual appreciation into an emotional one. Writing the songs became nothing less than learning on the job.

And once more, here is the Original Broadway Cast in video made for broadcast in Japan; this is the computer enhanced version.

 

One thing I’d like to point out about the video that was made of the original production for viewing in Japan. While there are a few places where I’d like to re-edit the scenes a bit to make them clearer, for the most part, I really like the choices that the video director made. There are lots of wide shots of the entire stage. That means that the actors faces aren’t very clear but you can see what’s happening on the whole stage picture, and I find that very helpful. I wish more videos of theatrical productions followed suit and used fewer closeups.