Pacific Overtures (1976)
Book: John Weidman
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In short: Pacific Overtures is a unique, ambitious, and powerful journey into nineteenth-century Japan — otherworldly and brilliant.
A geopolitical history lesson wrapped in a Japanese fable wrapped in a Broadway musical, the show has a score that’s dauntingly clever even by the standards of Stephen Sondheim’s elevated genius bar.
Peter marks (washington post)
Overview Pacific Overtures - background and excerpts
Pacific Overtures stands out for its unique subject matter and inventive approach. This unusual musical tells the story of Japan’s forced opening to the West from a Japanese point of view. Its music reflects this blend of cultures, combining traditional Japanese theatrical elements with Western influences. Pacific Overtures Pacific Overtures is both thematically and musically ambitious, with an extensive runtime and a large cast. It also features one of Sondheim’s own favorite songs.
Plot and Themes
Based on historical events starting in 1853, Pacific Overtures explores Japan’s reluctant opening to the outside world under Western pressure, beginning with the arrival of American ships off Japan’s coast.
In a letter to the Japanese emperor, the American admiral describes the “very reasonable and pacific overtures” offered by the U.S. president, though he warns of returning with a larger fleet if Japan refuses. The title Pacific Overtures thus refers to both the opening of Pacific relations between America and Japan and the supposedly peaceful offers made by the U.S. and other Western powers, including the Netherlands.
Guided by a character called the “Reciter,” the story centers on two friends forced apart by political events. Key themes include the clash between tradition and change, cultural tensions, and the unavoidable modernization Japan faces. The musical takes a critical look at Western imperialism and also reflects on the costs of isolationism.
Japanese influences
The musical adopts a Japanese perspective. Sondheim’s music is rich with Japanese influences, and his lyrics are often written in, or inspired by, haiku form. The sense of an isolated, archaic Japan is reinforced by the use of short, simple words from the same linguistic family, a pattern only broken when Western ambassadors arrive, bringing with them a flood of long words and terms from Romance and other language families.
The original production was inspired by traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, where men alone perform dramas through stylized movement, music, and distinct vocal techniques. In the original Broadway version of the musical, male actors also took on female roles in keeping with this tradition.
When the Shogun
is weak,
then the tea
must be strong,
my lord…
Without
someone in a tree,
nothing happened here.
Reception
Producer and director Hal Prince was the one who persuaded Sondheim and others to join this unusual project. Arranger Jonathan Tunick recalled, “We were all dragged kicking and screaming by Hal, including Steve. Because it’s such an outlandish idea. And the excitement, the charm, and the delight you take in the show is the challenge it presents: ‘What are they going to do with this?’”
The show was—and still is—a challenge for audiences. Although Sondheim’s contribution was consistently praised, many critics found the highly unconventional production hard to grasp or described it as dull or unclear in its perspective. The original production closed after only six months and wasn’t a commercial success, though it did receive ten Tony nominations.
Current appreciation
Over time, appreciation for Pacific Overtures has grown, and it is now regarded as a bold and artistically ambitious musical that tackles important, relevant themes with a unique cultural sensitivity and musical brilliance. However, revivals of Pacific Overtures are rarer than other Sondheim shows due to its unique demands on cast and production. A successful 2017 revival featuring George Takei as the Reciter reduced the production length by an hour and scaled down the cast from around 35 to just 10. Songs from Pacific Overtures rarely appear in Sondheim concert repertoires because they are so closely tied to the show’s specific plot, atmosphere, and style, contributing to the musical’s relative obscurity.
Video excerpts (in show's order)
All songs can be seen in the original cast version, where the Kabuki style is clearly visible.
- In the opening number, “Advantages of floating in the middle of the sea” the Reciter paints a picture of isolationist Japan in 1853.
- “Chrysanthemum tea”, one of the show’s favorites, is a brilliantly rhymed and humorous full scene. Spanning several days, the song shows how the Shogun’s mother poisons her son, hoping his death will make the Americans leave.
- “Someone in a tree” is a masterpiece that Sondheim considers one of his favorites. After writing it, he was emotional playing it for John Weidman. In the song, eyewitnesses recall a historic meeting between Americans and Japanese that ultimately led to the Kanagawa Treaty. A man, in dialogue with his younger self, describes how he watched from afar as a child, while another tells how he only heard the events from beneath the floorboards where he hid for safety. Sondheim: “I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyric, but what I love is the ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present, and future into one packaged song form.”
- “Please hello” presents the successive ambassadors from different nations demanding access to Japan. Both the order and the demands made are historically accurate. The music features stylized imitations of each ambassador’s national music, including music for Dutch clogging. Since the musical is told from the Japanese perspective, the Japanese characters speak in formal English, while the ambassadors speak broken English with heavy accents. This song also breaks from the simple lyrical style used up to this point, as Sondheim explains below.
- “A bowler hat” illustrates how the customs of the Western newcomers start to weave into Japanese culture. In the song, we again hear about the traditionally lucky “spider on the wall,” first mentioned in “Chrysanthemum Tea.” This time, however, the spider is killed, and the positive association has been forgotten.
The song stops,
the bird flies,
The mind stirs,
the heart replies,
“There is no
other way.”
We don’t foresee
that you will be
the least bit argumentative.
So please ignore
the man-of-war
we brought as
a preventative.
One must accommodate
the times
as one lives them.
One must
remember that.
Stephen Sondheim about Pacific Overtures
“Writing Pacific Overtures reinforced something I’d begun to learn and am learning still: of my three guiding principles – Less is More, Content Dictates Form, God Is in the Details – the first is the hardest to put into practice. The struggle against discursiveness never ends and is too often unsuccessful, even for writers who know better. […] A good lyrics, even a patter song, cannot afford unnecessary words, redundancies or needless flourishes. The price of such extravagance is diffusion – nothing blunts a strong emotion or a good punch line as effectively as too many words. […]
I’d written lean lyrics before, but with Pacific Overtures I tried to make that leanness a style. Following John Weidman’s example in his dialogue, I restricted myself as much as I could to an unadorned, basic vocabulary until the song “Please Hello,” which opens Act Two and accompanies the entrance of ambassadors from foreign countries demanding rights and commodities and introducing long words with Latinate roots. I hoped the contrast would lend the other songs a slightly stilted, archaic feel, to convey the out-of-touch isolation of the country. Content Dictates Style, as well as Form.“
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Reviews of Pacific Overtures
Original production (1976)
“So the musical is to tell the story of Japan’s Westernization as if it were a Kabuki drama — but, of course, it soon becomes much more complicated than that. Mr. Sondheim’s music is in a style that might be called Japonaiserie (Leonard Bernstein quite often seems to be trysting with Madame Butterfly in the orchestra pit) but also uses some authentic Japanese instruments. The lyrics are totally Western and — as is the custom with Mr. Sondheim — devilish, wittily and delightfully clever. Musically there is a disparity between Mr. Sondheim’s operettalike elegance and ethnic overlay, but even this succeeds with all its carefully applied patina of pastiche — that on demand can embrace Sullivan or Offenbach. Mr. Sondheim is the most remarkable man in the Broadway musical today — and here he shows it victoriously. But it could be a pyrrhic victory. The form of the musical itself is perhaps not up to the seriousness of the material and the sensitivity and sensibility with which it is presented. Moreover, Mr. Weidman’s book, while strikingly original, does not always rest happily within the conceptual format of the show — at times it seems as though we are well and truly in the world of Suzie Wong.” – Clive Barnes, The New York Times (1976)
Off-Broadway production (2017)
“Mr. Sondheim’s songs for Pacific Overtures are complete miniature dramas, loaded and compressed to a profound intensity. As their pentatonic melodies and Western harmonies recapitulate the cultural conflict, their lyrics achieve the pith and mystery of haiku. Most of all, the numbers astonish with their narrative nimbleness. […] One after another, especially as performed here in a 90-minute, one-act version with a much-revised script, these songs form a kind of conceptual art exhibition showing how, with enormous craft, Mr. Sondheim solved the riddle of the show’s convoluted point of view.” – Jesse Green, The New York Times (2017)
Signature Theatre, Virginia revival (2023)
“Somewhere on the musical-theater periodic table between the work of Bertolt Brecht and Rodgers and Hammerstein sits Pacific Overtures. A geopolitical history lesson wrapped in a Japanese fable wrapped in a Broadway musical, the show has a score that’s dauntingly clever even by the standards of Stephen Sondheim’s elevated genius bar. […] The tension between an age-old isolation and encroaching globalism plays out in John Weidman’s episodic book and Sondheim’s score, one of his most adventurous. With the aid of Jonathan Tunick’s peerless orchestrations, the songwriter emulates his mentor here, Oscar Hammerstein II, by planting Broadway’s flag boldly in another culture. Sondheim sent us to Sweden in A Little Night Music and Britain in Sweeney Todd and Italy in Passion but never undertook the role of cultural observer as seriously as in Pacific Overtures. (Some may now call this appropriation; Miyamoto’s mastery in a Japanese version suggests universality in the work rather than paternalism.) The result is a dazzlingly smart and affecting set of 11 numbers that range from the burlesque of “Welcome to Kanagawa” to the “Rashomon”-like brilliance of “Someone in a Tree.” – Peter Marks, Washington Post (2023).
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