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| The Cast of "Pacific Overtures" (photo: Mark S. Howard) |
They had us with the cherry blossoms. And the screens,
so brilliantly lit. “They” would be the stars of the current
Lyric Stage production of the musical Pacific Overtures, namely
Scenic Designer Janie E. Howland and Lighting Designer Karen Perlow.
This is not to say that they are the only outstanding contributors to
this show, but they help to overcome some of the challenges this work
presents, especially in this most intimate setting. Never has it
been more accurate to state that less is more, more or less.
In
1976, Pacific Overtures, a
new Sondheim musical bound for Broadway, received
its world premiere in Boston. The unusual premise of the play was the
Japanese viewpoint of the incursion of American warships under
Commodore Perry in 1853 Japan, to initiate trade with a country that
had been closed to foreigners for centuries. It offered Music and
Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a Book by John Weidman (a wise choice,
given that he majored in Eastern Asian History at Harvard). The
Broadway mounting lasted only six months, despite ten Tony Award
nominations, and remains one of Sondheim's least performed works. Thus
it was joyful news for lovers of the show to hear that Lyric would be
producing it, Directed by Spiro Veloudos, the company's Producing
Artistic Director. About as far from the stereotypical tired
businessman's musical as one could get, it demands a great deal from
its audiences as well.
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| Micheline Wu in "Pacific Overtures" (photo: Mark S. Howard) |
In the preface to the published version of the play, its
creators acknowledge their unusual use of Japanese kabuki
theater's three conventions: all roles, male and female,
played by male performers; the use of a Reciter who alternately
comments on the action, joins it, or speaks in place of one of the
other characters; and the presence of a hanamichi or runway,
allowing performers to make entrances and exits through the house, as
well as the changing of props and costumes onstage by a group of
stagehands clad in black (the color of non-existence to the Japanese,
literally invisible to them). They also wrote, in the spirit of
Japanese haiku poetry, with its distinctive brevity, lack of
explicitness, and strict form. While there are, strictly speaking,
few pure examples in the text, the form is self-evident, avoiding
what Sondheim notes in his monumental work, Finishing the Hat,
the dual traps of banality and vagueness leading to “less is
less”, keeping it simple (but dense) vs. simplistic, balancing that
fine line "between economy of means and penury of ideas".
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| Carl Hsu & Sam Hamashima in "Pacific Overtures" (photo: Mark S. Howard) |
The current Lyric presentation preserves much of this,
while not limiting the performers to men (which the original did
until its contemporary finale). In so doing, something is gained and
something is lost. Sondheim's “less is more” is one of his three
fundamental dicta (the other two being that content dictates form, as
well as style, and that God is in the details). His lyrics are lean,
making the most out of the least, which he describes as an
unforgiving compact form. In that sense, losing the kabuki core
element of an all-male principal cast loses significant impact as a
deeply imbedded cultural norm. On the other hand, mixed gender
casting allows for a broader version of how all people share in the
success and failure of a historically crucial encounter. It does make
it difficult to tell when actress Lisa Yuen, with no costume change,
is speaking as Reciter or Shogun. Lyric's vision is also less
physically overwhelming than past lavish productions, gaining
intimacy and approachability where others were grander and more
removed. The spare but lovely Scenic Design is an example of
something gained while other things are lost (not unlike the folk
song by Joni Michell, “Both Sides Now”, popularized by Judy
Collins), in living everyday. As with much of Japanese culture, what
is omitted is as important as what is left in.
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| Kai Chao in "Pacific Overtures" (photo: Mark S. Howard) |
As it might be put in Japanese poetry, with its three lines with five, seven and five syllables each:
In style of haiku
This multi-gender casting
Is kabuki light
This is obvious in Act I, which consists of unadorned
basic vocabulary with an archaic feel, while Act II, beginning with
“Please Hello” uses longer words with Latinate roots. The story
is narrated by the Reciter, who is both teacher and guide, which
begins with the reactions of two men and follows for fifteen years
thereafter the relationship between them: Kayama (Carl Hsu), a minor
samurai who is instructed to order the ships to leave, and Manjiro
(Sam Hamashima), a fisherman recently returned from the U.S.
Throughout the tale, there are many basic superstitions, requiring
some ingenuity on the part of the Japanese (for example, they avoid
having the foreigners touching the land, as they build platforms to
prevent it). Much of the story is told in its music: in one comic
scene, admirals from five countries pitch their goods via differing
musical styles: the U.S. (using Sousa inspired march), England
(Gilbert and Sullivan patter), the Netherlands (a clog dance), Russia
(a dirge) and France (a can-can). At the heart of the meeting is the
song “Someone in a Tree”, wherein an Old Man (Brandon Milardo)
complains that when he was a Boy (Karina Wen), he could see
everything but heard nothing, while a Warrior (Gary Thomas Ng)
grouses that he heard all but saw nothing, setting the stage for a
Rashomon allusion.
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| The Cast of "Pacific Overtures" (photo: Mark S. Howard) |
As is typically the case in a Sondheim musical, most
story lines occur in song. There is the ironic song “Bowler Hat”,
the bittersweet evolution of Kayama's gradual Westernization, and
the people's cry that they thought the arrival of the warships as
“the end of the world”, and the Reciter's powerful answer: “And
it was”. Then there is the long song “Chrysanthemum Tea” as the
Empress poisons her son: “ships in bay...must be illusions”;
there is the fatalistic notion that “the blossom falls on the
mountain, the mountain falls on the blossom, all things fall.” The
“tipping point” is the final number, “Next!”, with its
apocalyptic imposition of Western culture over the haiku.
Sondheim once joked that this was “historical narrative as
written by a Japanese who's seen a lot of American musicals”.
This version, pared down though it is, is vocally
sublime. The talented ensemble (there are eleven performers in
fifty-three roles) was composed of Kai Chao, Alexander Holden, Elaine
Hom, Brandon Milardo, Gary Thomas Ng, Jeff Song, Karina Wen, and
Micheline Wu (who also provided the choreography). The Music
Director was Jonathan Goldberg (who is rightly singled out in the
program), along with Associate Music Director Matthew Stern (in his
Lyric debut, but well known in several other regional companies),
with Costume Design by Gail Astrid Buckley, Sound Design by Andrew
Duncan Will, Mask Design by Brynna Bloomfield and “Violence Design”
by Ted Hewlett. Still, some of the choices made remain inscrutable,
losing that sense of the remote and exotic, the foreign and
formalized, as when at the end of Act I, with no visible sense of its
being a “lion dance” fizzled, through no fault of Kai Chao who,
as Perry, performed it.
Audiences should in the end be thankful to encounter
this rare work, through June 16th.
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