Preview 2004-2005: In the Middle of the World We Float
The show was called Pacific Overtures, and it may rank as the most rigorous and overtly uncommercial work ever to be offered to theatregoers in a lavish, commercial Broadway production. It's significant that Pacific Overtures followed three brilliant Sondheim-Prince shows, Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music, which made it appear that there was nothing the team couldn't pull off.
With men taking female roles, an all-Asian, mostly male cast, and a Kabuki-style "hanamichi" or runway extending from the stage out into the auditorium of the Winter Garden Theatre, Pacific Overtures was as daringly different as any musical ever seen on Broadway. Sondheim's score was dazzling in its intelligence and beauty, highlighted by exquisite pieces like "Someone in a Tree" and "A Bowler Hat." And thanks to designers Boris Aronson, Florence Klotz, and Tharon Musser, the physical production was often breathtaking.
But beautiful and mesmerizing as it all was, it was also destined to fail, at least commercially. That's because Pacific Overtures lacked emotional power and a narrative with which one could get deeply involved. The show is more about ideas such as how Western influence corrupted Asian culture than about its principal characters such as magistrate Kayama and fisherman-turned-samurai Manjiro.
Nowadays, a piece like Pacific Overtures would very likely be introduced by a not-for-profit company. Opening on Broadway to very mixed reviews in 1976, Pacific Overtures managed a run of 193 performances and lost money. Late in the run, a live performance was preserved on a videotape that was telecast only in Japan.
In 1984, Pacific Overtures was revived by York Theatre Company, and the overpraised production was transferred by the Shubert Organization, Elizabeth McCann, and Nelle Nugent to a commercial run at off-Broadway's Promenade Theatre. With some script revisions and a five-piece orchestra, the production lasted 109 performances but was not a financial success. Performed for the first time by an all-Caucasian cast, Pacific Overtures received its London premiere by the English National Opera in 1987, a production that produced a complete, double-CD cast recording.
This fall, New York gets its third Pacific Overtures revival, and, in a sense, it's a revival of a revival. In the fall of 2000, Pacific Overtures had its Japanese stage premiere at the New National Theatre of Tokyo. Directed by Amon Miyamoto, the production greatly pleased Sondheim and book writer John Weidman, who were instrumental in seeing to it that the production -in Japanese, with English supertitles-came to New York. The Tokyo Pacific Overtures played a week of performances at Avery Fisher Hall as part of the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival. It went on from New York to Washington, D.C., where it closed the Kennedy Center's 2002 Sondheim Celebration.
In place of the original's bountiful visuals, Miyamoto's production was austere and minimal. Following theatrical precepts not of Kabuki but instead of Noh, the production featured more naturalistic acting as well as women in the principal female roles. The hanamichi was, during the first act, used dramatically, separating Japan from the outside world. For the arrival in Japan of the Americans at the end of the first act, there was a coup de théâtre involving an enormous American flag. Added to the "Next" finale were specific references to World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima, events that had been avoided in the original.
The Lincoln Center Festival mounting of the Tokyo Pacific Overtures won praise from Ben Brantley in The New York Times, who thought it was "directed with bountiful verve and imagination....In reinterpreting an American musical about their own country, Mr. Miyamoto and company have bestowed a great gift upon New York."
Roundabout Theatre Company has now hired Miyamoto to stage an English-language Pacific Overtures at Studio 54. It follows into that house another Sondheim-Weidman musical, Assassins, and will be Roundabout's fourth Sondheim revival, following Company, Follies, and Assassins. And while Pacific Overtures has never been about star casting, the Roundabout's version, which opens December 2, has a name in B.D. Wong, who will play the Reciter, a narrator-Emcee figure of the sort that no Studio 54 musical revival seems to be without.
New York might have received a different Pacific Overtures revival, one that also received praise in The New York Times. Critic Bruce Weber was impressed by a 2001 Chicago Shakespeare Theater production directed by Gary Griffin, known for his minimalist productions of musicals like My Fair Lady and A Little Night Music and the stager of Encores!' The New Moon and Pardon My English. Griffin's Pacific Overtures traveled to London's Donmar Warehouse last summer.
But the notion of a Japanese director offering his take on a show about Japanese history and culture may be more noteworthy, especially when it has already been praised by Brantley. Will the Roundabout version employ the same staging already seen in New York with the Japanese company? No doubt there will be similar elements, but there will, of course, be changes, even if the spare physical production seen at Lincoln Center ---a floating-island, Japanese temple of wood and screens-- would work well at Studio 54.
Natasha Richardson in A Streetcar Named Desire is scheduled to take over Studio 54 in the spring, so the Roundabout's Pacific Overtures seems to be destined for a short engagement. But then Pacific Overtures isn't a show likely to set the box office aflame. If Roundabout's acclaimed, Tony-winning Assassins was able to last only three months, there's little reason to think that Pacific Overtures will do a great deal better. So we're fortunate to have a company like Roundabout that can afford to mount sizable revivals of musicals that would not be able to sustain long runs in commercial Broadway situations.
________________________________________________
For upcoming Q & A columns, please send questions by clicking on the byline above kenmanbway@aol.com