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 The Theatreguide.London Review

In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others by streaming new shows. And we take the opportunity to explore other vintage productions preserved online. Until things return to normal we review the experience of watching live theatre onscreen.

Pacific Overtures
Japanese Television 1976 and YouTube    March 2023

When I saw the original Broadway production of Pacific Overtures in 1976, I was thrilled by the first fifteen minutes or so, as I sensed how ambitious and audacious the show's vision was. But excitement faded rapidly as it became clear how little of the ambition was being fulfilled.

Revisiting that production through this video recording made at the time for Japanese television (and yes, there's an irony in there someplace), its failings and not-quite successes are even more evident.

I am second to few as a Stephen Sondheim fan, but I can find too little here to recommend to any but the most hardcore Sondheimites.

The musical – songs by Sondheim, book by John Weidman, direction by Hal Prince – takes as its subject the nineteenth-century opening of super-isolationist Japan to the West through trade and gunboat diplomacy.

To compound the challenge, the creators decided to tell the story from the Japanese perspective, using Japanese theatrical and musical forms.

You may have spotted some of the problems already.

While musicals can touch on or reflect broad topics like juvenile gang warfare in New York, social unrest in nineteenth-century France or the founding of the United States, they have to have human stories at their core and human characters for the audience to care about.

Weidman does single out a couple of Japanese characters to look at from time to time, but only as representatives, not individuals. And there is only so far a team of twentieth-century Americans can go in imitating traditional Japanese art forms and only so far a twentieth-century American audience will be willing to follow them.

So, as this recording makes very clear, Sondheim may have built his songs on some traditional Japanese tonalities, but they wind up sounding about as Japanese as Richard Rodgers' King And I songs sound Siamese.

And, although the cast is made up almost entirely of Japanese-American performers, the cartoonish characters they play are about as Japanese as those in the Mikado.

(Which raises another issue, more disturbing today than it was a half-century ago: despite the actors all being Asian, isn't there more than a tinge of racism in the portrayal of all the Japanese characters as broad caricatures?)

The production is visually beautiful – it is noteworthy that the only Tony Awards it got were for set and costumes – but it is cold and uninvolving.

If you enjoy it, you do so on the intellectual level, admiring the cleverness with which various self-imposed technical challenges were set and at least partially achieved.

Consider a song Sondheim repeatedly cited as one of his favourites, Someone In A Tree.

Through a counterpoint of brief phrases, two characters who witnessed an event and the older version of one of them try to recreate it. One saw without hearing, one heard without seeing and one imperfectly remembers.

This is a song not only about the Roshomon effect but also about the limits of memory, the difficulty of creating a whole picture out of scattered fragments, the way being even peripherally connected to history boosts the ego, and even the metaphysical question of whether an event really happens unless there is a witness.

And it has to sound vaguely Japanese.

You can see why Sondheim loved this song – it was a puzzle and a challenge, and achieving any success at all with it must have been very satisfying, as making it work in performance must be for any who sing it.

But it is a pleasure that the audience is really left out of. We can, at best, admire the ambition and the accomplishment, but we can't share in the joy of creation.

And that is the ultimate bar to Pacific Overtures really working – the fun for the creators and performers is greater than for the audience.

When the various Western invaders come on to musical parodies – the Americans to a Sousa-like march, the British to imitation Gilbert-and-Sullivan, and so on – we react to the joke, not the critical point.

Chrysanthemum Tea is a patter song, not quite as fast as Company's Not Getting Married, but with the same audience challenge – listen carefully to the lyrics or you'll miss how clever I am.

The one most accessible song, the sweetly lyrical Pretty Lady, seems to have wandered in from some other musical.

The Japanese film star Mako is a strong presence playing the Narrator and several minor characters, but the rest of the large cast double and redouble roles, sometimes in masks or whiteface, giving them no opportunity to register.

It is quite possible that you will find that Pacific Overtures achieves more of its ambition than seemed to me. But it will be a cool and intellectual appreciation, not the result of being touched or moved.

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Review of Pacific Overtures (1976) - 2023