Patrons of Broadway were met with a surprise when, on the evening of January 11, 1976, they packed the Winter Garden Theatre for the opening of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. Sondheim later called the show “the most bizarre and unusual musical ever to be seen in a commercial setting.” (Finishing the Hat)
Directed and produced by Hal Prince, with a book by John Weidman, Pacific Overtures chronicles the 1853 American “gunboat diplomacy” of Commodore Matthew Perry, who forcibly opened Japan to foreign trade, ending 200 years of isolation and stability in the feudal “floating island kingdom.” The arrival of the American steamships, or “four black dragons,” set in motion Japan’s eventual rise as a high-tech Westernized nation, at the expense of its traditional culture. The story involves two characters on radically different trajectories: Manjiro is a Japanese fisherman who, after living in America, returns to his native land to warn of Perry’s impending expedition. Kayama is a low-level samurai, who is enlisted to tell the Americans that they are not welcome.
Pacific Overtures takes the form of traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, with male actors playing all roles, stylized makeup, and set changes made in full view of the audience by stagehands dressed in black. Seated onstage next to a Reciter are musicians who play traditional Japanese drums, shakuhachi, and shamisen. The show received mixed reviews, and closed after six months. Sondheim may have touched on the work’s principle weakness when he described it as “a show about ideas rather than characters.”
Sondheim and Prince approached the project with the image of a Japanese writer attempting to imitate a Broadway musical. Sondheim described his lyrics as “a kind of translator-ese,” with parable sentences, simple subject-predicate structures, and limited rhyme. “I tried to keep the lyrics haiku-like, and I tried to avoid all words with Latin roots…Romance language roots, to keep it simple but to prevent it from becoming poemsy, as opposed to poetic,” he explained. “Japanese haiku, when translated into English, trembles on the verge of parody: so you have to be very careful about it.”
Built on pentatonic and modal scales, and the influence of the Balinese gamelan, the music reflects the static Eastern concept of “being rather than becoming.” As the score unfolds, the lyrics and music become increasingly Westernized, with a brash quote of a Sousa march illustrating the cultural clash.
Ultimately, Sondheim created music which is neither authentically Japanese nor American. Instead, it inhabits the unlikely neutral ground of Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. The composer commented,
I was searching for a Western equivalent [of Japanese music], and one day I hit on the correlation between the Japanese scale and the music of Manuel de Falla, a composer whose work I admire a lot. So I just started to imitate him. I took the pentatonic scale and bunched the chords together until they resembled that terrific guitar sound. And I was able to relate to it because suddenly it had a Spanish Western feeling and at the same time an Eastern feeling. It seldom occurs to me to write in minor keys, but because I had to have the feeling of Japanese tonality this afforded me the opportunity to do it. (Zadan, 211)
Here are five key excerpts from Pacific Overtures:
The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea
Pacific Overtures opens with a Prologue, and The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea, which rises over a ferocious vamp to establish the dramatic situation:
Chrysanthemum Tea
The arrival of American warships causes panic. Commodore Perry, bearing a letter from U.S. President Fillmore, insists on speaking directly with the Shogun. But when visited by Lord Abe, Manjiro, and Kayama, the Shogun is indecisive. His scheming mother has poisoned him using chrysanthemum tea to prevent him from receiving the letter:
Someone in a Tree
Stephen Sondheim conceived of songs as “dramas in microcosm.” The trio, Someone in a Tree, is a sublime example.
The Reciter explains that no record exists of the negotiations between Commodore Perry’s delegation and the Japanese. But the events come to life through the memories of three witnesses: a warrior hidden beneath the floor of the Treaty House who hears the debate, a young boy who sees the negotiations from his perch in a tree outside, and the boy as an old man who reflects on his silent observance of history. Amid the building tension of a vamp, the old man insists that he saw everything, and that in his younger days, he was good at climbing trees.
For Sondheim, the song is about history and the stretching of time, reflected in repeating, gradually shifting minimalistic patterns.
A Bowler Hat
The dramatic premise of Pacific Overtures is encapsulated in the second act waltz, A Bowler Hat. It is a wistful reflection on the changes which have come as a result of Western influence:
Pretty Lady
Unfolding as a canon, Pretty Lady is a gentle, dreamy English sea shanty. Three Cockney sailors on shore leave mistake the daughter of a samurai for a geisha. Confused, the sailors become increasingly persistent and offer the girl money. When she cries for help, her father kills one of the men.
Recordings
- Sondheim: Pacific Overtures (Original Broadway Cast Recording) Amazon
- Someone in a Tree: Anatomy of a Song, Part 1, Part 2
Featured Image: a scene from the original Broadway production of “Pacific Overtures” in 1975