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East meets West
NSMT makes Overtures
BY IRIS FANGER

When back in 1975 the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical Pacific Overtures opened in Boston for its pre-Broadway tryout, it was greeted with a caustic review from the Boston Globe, whose Kevin Kelly opined that "Pacific Overtures sank on opening night." But time and the legion of Sondheim fans have proved otherwise. Sondheim groupies bought the original-cast recording and "wore it out," says Kent Gash, the associate artistic director of Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre Company and the man who’ll be directing the revival that opens at North Shore Music Theatre this Tuesday. A co-production of NSMT, the Cincinnati Playhouse, and Alliance, the show comes to this its last stop trailing excellent reviews.

"I was in high school in Denver and didn’t see the original production," says Gash. "But after hearing the first two songs, I was completely taken by it." Since then, the show has been redeemed by a well-reviewed 1984 Off Broadway revival, which Gash did see. The New National Theatre of Japan production garnered raves and full houses a year ago at the Sondheim Festival at DC’s Kennedy Center and at Avery Fisher Hall in New York. And a stripped-down version by Chicago Shakespeare Company is currently running at London’s Donmar Warehouse.

The odyssey of Pacific Overtures began when then-fledgling playwright John Weidman, an East Asian history major in college, dreamed up the idea of a play focused on Commodore Matthew Perry’s forced opening of Japan to the West. The work would cover 120 years, reflecting the momentous changes as Japan moved from an isolated "floating kingdom" to a world economic force. Weidman took his first draft to director Harold Prince, who was interested but suggested rewriting the material from a Japanese point of view and adding music. Sondheim was commissioned to write the score, which he based on the Japanese pentatonic scale accompanied by simple lyrics, often in haiku form. Directed by Prince, the Broadway production incorporated Japanese theater traditions from kabuki, noh, and bunraku, with lavish sets and costumes.

Gash has followed Prince’s lead. "I’m speaking to the score and breadth of vision of Hal Prince’s production. One of the things that the piece is ultimately about, and that has made it so timely in the past year or two, is the casualties that occur when cultures collide and when cultures usurp each other. For us to understand the radical shift, you must have some sense of what that hermetically sealed world was before Admiral Perry arrived. The way you understand that is an inundation of culture and movement and visualization."

Like Prince, Gash has cast the show with Asian-American actors: 12 men, who play all the roles, and two women who are dressed in black and function as visible stagehands, as in Japanese theater practice. "It was critical to me to have all Asians in the cast because there is a sense of ownership of the material that is different. I’ve experienced the same thing when I’ve worked on African-American productions. There is a bonding and a celebration of being able to come into the room with people from similar cultural backgrounds and never have the value of that experience questioned or denigrated.

"You can say it’s a musical about the Westernization of Japan. But it’s also about wonderful men whose fates happen to intertwine at a critical juncture of Japanese evolution. You come to understand better a whole culture and nation through vignettes that are personal, that make history. You understand it on human terms, which is how we have to understand our history to be responsible to each other."

Pacific Overtures is at North Shore Music Theatre, 62 Dunham Road in Beverly, August 26 through September 14. Tickets are $26 to $63; call (978) 232-7200.


Issue Date: August 22 - August 28, 2003
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