Also this issue:

Taking the Stage
After years in the making, the Philadelphia Gay & Lesbian Theatre Festival becomes a reality.
-Lewis Whittington

Feast on Furniture
-Lori Hill

Artquicks
More stuff going on this week...

Wonders in Wood
-Susan Hagen

Day of the Poet
-Ainé Ardron-Doley

The Importance of Being Earnest
-Juliet Fletcher

BigSmorgasbord WunderWerk
-Steve Cohen

See Red
-Toby Zinman

June 5-11, 2003

theater

Happy Alliance

MAKING OVERTURES: Rich Ceraulo as Kayama and Jorge E. Maldonado as Manjiro.

by David Anthony Fox

Pacific Overtures remains the most elliptical -- and, I hazard to guess, infrequently produced -- of the six musicals composed by Stephen Sondheim and directed by Harold Prince. (Even the megaflop Merrily We Roll Along has latterly achieved more commercial viability.)

The reasons for this are complex, and I share some of the general ambivalence about the piece. But before going further, let me say with no mixed feelings that Pacific Overtures is a work anyone interested in musical theater should know -- and the Arden Theatre's exquisite production, masterfully directed by Terrence Nolen, is as convincing an argument for the show as any I've experienced (and that includes the legendary original staging).

I like to imagine Sondheim and Prince pitching Pacific Overtures to a room full of bemused investors: "Our new musical is about the coercive opening of Japan in 1853 by Commodore Matthew Perry, instigated on behalf of President Millard Fillmore, to American military and trade interests. We'll employ a cast of virtual unknowns, nearly all of them Asian men. Oh, and we're planning on a Broadway opening just in time to celebrate the bicentennial."

No one would ever accuse Sondheim and Prince of courting popularity, but even by their standards Overtures seemed almost deliberately perverse. The show certainly stretched the boundaries of the "can't they just assimilate and get along with us?" view typical of many West-meets-East musicals.

More than 25 years after I first saw Overtures, I'm still on the fence about it. There's much that I love in the show. Sondheim's score is one of his most haunting and sophisticated, emphasizing hypnotic storytelling ensembles over simple solos. Neophyte book writer John Weidman employed a clever strategy, unfolding the action through two complementary, interlocking, yet very different personal narratives: of Manjiro, a Japanese sailor who has once been rescued by an American whaling boat; and Kayama, a samurai whose rise to power comes through interaction with the Western forces.

What remains troubling about Overtures is that Weidman's book goes on too long, and in Act I especially he continues to hammer away at the same basic points. More seriously, the show smacks of a kind of appropriation we also see in Madama Butterfly (or, closer to home, in Porgy and Bess): white American writers who take on the position of "defending" a minority cultural experience, with more than a little attendant sense of noblesse oblige. In Overtures, this is all the more problematic because Prince essentially lifted the grammar and theatricality of Japanese stagecraft -- without really considering (or even knowing anything about) the deeper resonance of the style. Indeed, it wasn't always clear in Prince's gorgeous original staging whether he was honoring Kabuki traditions, or mocking them.

Happily, that is not an issue in Terrence Nolen's production at the Arden, which gains greatly from a pared-down, elegant and, frankly, more informed use of Japanese stage practices. Nolen employs a smaller ensemble (12 actors here, versus more than 30 in the original); this too helps clarify the storytelling, and makes us care more about individual characters. The tradition of casting men to play male and female roles remains here, but it is a noticeably mixed-race cast, which underscores that the perspective we are seeing is not authentically Japanese, but a fascinating cultural hybrid.

All of this alone would not be enough. What makes the Arden production so compelling is its beauty and sincerity, the committed acting on view from every member of the ensemble and the superlative musical preparation by Eric Ebbenga (especially impressive in a theater-in-the-round production where the orchestra is not visible to the audience or the cast). And for sheer oohs and aahs, the costumes are sumptuous -- I want to add every single piece to my personal wardrobe!

The Arden's Pacific Overtures is their most accomplished and thoughtful production yet of a Sondheim musical, and does great honor to its source. I urge you to attend, and promise a thought-provoking evening unlike anything you'll see again.

Pacific Overtures

Through June 22, Arden Theatre, 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122