East West Gamers has a protracted historical past with “Pacific Overtures,” Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1976 musical in regards to the opening of Japan to worldwide commerce by American warships in 1853 and the historic ramifications nobody may have predicted.
Mako, the corporate’s founding creative director, performed the Reciter within the musical’s Broadway premiere and directed his personal 1978 manufacturing at EWP, the place he reprised his Tony-nominated efficiency. Tim Dang, who served as creative director of EWP for greater than 20 years, directed a 1998 revival of “Pacific Overtures” that inaugurated the David Henry Hwang Theater.
Dang’s return to EWP to direct one other manufacturing of this massively formidable musical seems to be the most effective issues to have occurred in 2024, a minimum of from a theater perspective. The brand new revival of “Pacific Overtures” will be the most spectacular manufacturing I’ve seen wherever all 12 months.
It’s additionally one of the vital entertaining. I wasn’t anticipating to jot down such a sentence about an summary and a few may even say abstruse Sondheim musical that has had just one short-lived Broadway revival. Producers are intimidated by its creative calls for, to say nothing of its monetary prices. “Pacific Overtures” undoubtedly isn’t a musical for theatergoers who wish to flip off their brains for a few hours.
Sondheim and Weidman got down to create a present that examines a watershed second in Japanese historical past by means of a Japanese cultural perspective. The musical, within the phrases of the revealed script, “was written as a Japanese conception of what a Broadway musical might be as conceived from the traditional Japanese theatrical viewpoint.”
Type and content material are inextricably certain in a musical that melds parts of Kabuki and Bunraku with the rhythms of American musical theater. The shifting stability of energy between these aesthetic worldviews encapsulates the story of what occurred when Japan was pried open to Western influences.
My most memorable expertise of “Pacific Overtures” was a Japanese manufacturing that was featured within the 2002 Lincoln Heart Competition. Revivals don’t come alongside all that always, so don’t cross up this chance to see this spectacular manufacturing. I’m grateful to East West Gamers not just for the large care lavished on the staging, but additionally for the boldness of its strategy. I can’t consider one other firm with as spectacular a Sondheim observe report that might be as dexterous and audaciously humorous deploying painted faces and masks, cross-dressing and stylized motion, together with different touchstones of Kabuki artistry. EWP magically brings this collection of Sondheim-infused silk screens to life.
Jon Jon Briones takes on the position of the Reciter in addition to the Shogun and Emperor, transferring gracefully from narration to enactment. He units the stage for the musical within the music “The Advantage of Floating in the Middle of the Sea,” which surveys the customs which have outlined a civilization that has made probably the most of its insularity. Briones’ singing has an easy, here-are-the-facts high quality that nonetheless attracts out the unerring precision of Sondheim’s lyrics.
“Pacific Overtures” covers monumental floor, however on the middle are two characters whose fates replicate their nation’s travails. Kayama (Brian Kim McCormick), a minor samurai who has been tasked with telling the American intruders to go away, and Manjiro (Adam Kaokept), a Japanese fisherman who returns from the U.S. to warn Japan of the approaching American naval risk, are performed with endearing sympathy as we watch them wrestle to not get trampled within the geopolitical stampede.
Some of the poignant moments happens on the residence of Kayama and his spouse, Tamate (Ashley En-Fu Matthews), as they confront his doomed project of fending off the People. As Tamate dances to precise the emotional weight of the scenario, two observers provide a somberly stunning rendition of “There Is No Other Way.”
The staging of this quantity unfolds with butterfly subtlety on Tesshi Nakagawa’s Japanese-style set. Sittichai Chaiyahat and Gemma Pedersen, wanting down from their balcony, sing the music that expresses the couple’s fears in lyrics which have the profound simplicity of haikus. “The word stops, the heart dies / The wind counts the lost goodbyes,” goes one characteristically haunting stanza.
The massive solid incorporates so many magnificent voices that I’d like to report intimately in regards to the performers who in “Four Black Dragons” vividly chronicle the rising navy menace. And I actually should extol the graciously ironic dealing with of “Chrysanthemum Tea,” a kind of oh-so-clever Sondheim numbers that spans monumental dramatic territory in a fashion so catchy that the music appears to gallop.
A scene from Tim Dang’s manufacturing of “Pacific Overtures” at East West Gamers.
(Teolindo)
However time and area restrictions insist that I transfer straight to “Someone in a Tree,” which Sondheim has cited as his favourite of his musical theater songs. He appreciated the way in which the quantity distills a posh dramatic scene into lyrics, collapsing “past, present and future in a packaged song form” that data the witness testimony of those that had incomplete data of the fateful treaty signing that may redirect not simply the destiny of a nation however the course of world historical past.
Gedde Watanabe, Briones, Pedersen and Chaiyahat present why Sondheim had such a excessive estimation of the music that, in his personal phrases, “comes closest to the heart of ‘Pacific Overtures’: historical narrative as written by a Japanese who’s seen a lot of American musicals.” I adore it for the way in which it captures historical past’s unimaginable vastness with a melancholy sweetness that’s savored right here.
Sufficient with the rating, expertly dealt with by music director and conductor Marc Macalintal and an orchestra that blends Japanese and Western devices to hypnotic impact. The costumes of Naomi Yoshida deserve their very own shiny catalog, so vibrant are the colours and so expressive the silhouettes. The hair and make-up of Yoko Haitz is an integral a part of the scenic sorcery. David Murakami’s projections increase the theatrical image, conjuring a warship with the pace and stealth of an undeterrable shark. Brian Gale’s lighting and Cricket Myers’ sound design fine-tune the intricately layered mis-en-scene. And Yuka Takara’s choreography measures the comparatively tight taking part in space with minimalist aplomb.
The Western figures intent on racking up buying and selling victories are hilariously despatched up in “Please Hello,” a Gilbert and Sullivan impressed quantity that nonetheless maintains the Japanese perspective on these bullying capitalists. Within the music “A Bowler Hat,” Sondheim’s genius is unmistakable in the way in which he finds the reality of what’s been culturally misplaced and gained in a easy clothes metaphor. In “Next,” the present’s closing quantity, he finds the proper phrase to seize the unbridled tempo of change.
Just like the characters in “Pacific Overtures,” we too reside in fascinating occasions, because the previous curse euphemistically places it. For those who want one more reason to see a revival that I can not reward sufficient, let me add that this musical provides a profound glimpse of how historical past can overtake us, altering actuality in methods which can be laborious to think about. Sondheim and Weidman administer this lesson with musical theater poetry. Amongst this revival’s many virtues is its personal impeccable historic timing.
‘Pacific Overtures’
The place: David Henry Hwang Theater within the Union Heart of the Arts, 120 Decide John Aiso St., L.A.
When: 8 p.m. Fridays, Mondays. 2 and eight p.m. Saturdays, 5 p.m. Sundays.
Tickets: Beginning at $44
Contact: (213) 625-7000 or eastwestplayers.org
Working time: Roughly 2 hours, 20 minutes, together with a 15 minute intermission