Review: A magnificent revival of Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’

East West Players has a long history with “Pacific Overtures,” Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1976 musical about the opening of Japan to international trade by American warships in 1853 and the historical ramifications no one could have predicted.

Mako, the company’s founding artistic director, played the Reciter in the musical’s Broadway premiere and directed his own 1978 production at EWP, where he reprised his Tony-nominated performance. Tim Dang, who served as artistic director of EWP for more than 20 years, directed a 1998 revival of “Pacific Overtures” that inaugurated the David Henry Hwang Theater.

Dang’s return to EWP to direct another production of this hugely ambitious musical turns out to be one of the best things to have happened in 2024, at least from a theater perspective. The new revival of “Pacific Overtures” may be the most impressive production I’ve seen anywhere all year.

It’s also one of the most entertaining. I wasn’t expecting to write such a sentence about an abstract and some might even say abstruse Sondheim musical that has had only one short-lived Broadway revival. Producers are intimidated by its artistic demands, to say nothing of its financial costs. “Pacific Overtures” definitely isn’t a musical for theatergoers who want to turn off their brains for a couple of hours.

Sondheim and Weidman set out to create a show that examines a watershed moment in Japanese history through a Japanese cultural perspective. The musical, in the words of the published script, “was written as a Japanese conception of what a Broadway musical might be as conceived from the traditional Japanese theatrical viewpoint.”

Form and content are inextricably bound in a musical that melds elements of Kabuki and Bunraku with the rhythms of American musical theater. The shifting balance of power between these aesthetic worldviews encapsulates the story of what happened when Japan was pried open to Western influences.

My most memorable experience of “Pacific Overtures” was a Japanese production that was featured in the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival. Revivals don’t come along all that often, so don’t pass up this opportunity to see this spectacular production. I’m grateful to East West Players not only for the enormous care lavished on the staging, but also for the boldness of its approach. I can’t think of another company with as impressive a Sondheim track record that could be as dexterous and audaciously funny deploying painted faces and masks, cross-dressing and stylized movement, along with other touchstones of Kabuki artistry. EWP magically brings this series of Sondheim-infused silk screens to life.

Jon Jon Briones takes on the role of the Reciter as well as the Shogun and Emperor, moving gracefully from narration to enactment. He sets the stage for the musical in the song “The Advantage of Floating in the Middle of the Sea,” which surveys the customs that have defined a civilization that has made the most of its insularity. Briones’ singing has a straightforward, here-are-the-facts quality that nonetheless draws out the unerring precision of Sondheim’s lyrics.

“Pacific Overtures” covers enormous ground, but at the center are two characters whose fates reflect their nation’s travails. Kayama (Brian Kim McCormick), a minor samurai who has been tasked with telling the American intruders to leave, and Manjiro (Adam Kaokept), a Japanese fisherman who returns from the U.S. to warn Japan of the coming American naval threat, are played with endearing sympathy as we watch them struggle not to get trampled in the geopolitical stampede.

One of the most poignant moments occurs at the home of Kayama and his wife, Tamate (Ashley En-Fu Matthews), as they confront his doomed assignment of warding off the Americans. As Tamate dances to express the emotional weight of the situation, two observers offer a somberly beautiful rendition of “There Is No Other Way.”

The staging of this number unfolds with butterfly subtlety on Tesshi Nakagawa’s Japanese-style set. Sittichai Chaiyahat and Gemma Pedersen, looking down from their balcony, sing the song that expresses the couple’s fears in lyrics that have the profound simplicity of haikus. “The word stops, the heart dies / The wind counts the lost goodbyes,” goes one characteristically haunting stanza.

The large cast contains so many magnificent voices that I would love to report in detail about the performers who in “Four Black Dragons” vividly chronicle the growing military menace. And I really ought to extol the graciously ironic handling of “Chrysanthemum Tea,” one of those oh-so-clever Sondheim numbers that spans enormous dramatic territory in a manner so catchy that the song seems to gallop.

But time and space restrictions insist that I move straight to “Someone in a Tree,” which Sondheim has cited as his favorite of his musical theater songs. He appreciated the way the number distills a complex dramatic scene into lyrics, collapsing “past, present and future in a packaged song form” that records the witness testimony of those who had incomplete knowledge of the fateful treaty signing that will redirect not just the fate of a nation but the course of world history.

Gedde Watanabe, Briones, Pedersen and Chaiyahat show why Sondheim had such a high estimation of the song that, in his own words, “comes closest to the heart of ‘Pacific Overtures’: historical narrative as written by a Japanese who’s seen a lot of American musicals.” I love it for the way it captures history’s impossible vastness with a melancholy sweetness that is savored here.

Enough with the score, expertly handled by music director and conductor Marc Macalintal and an orchestra that blends Eastern and Western instruments to hypnotic effect. The costumes of Naomi Yoshida deserve their own glossy catalog, so vibrant are the colors and so expressive the silhouettes. The hair and makeup of Yoko Haitz is an integral part of the scenic sorcery. David Murakami’s projections augment the theatrical picture, conjuring a warship with the speed 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 relatively tight playing area with minimalist aplomb.

The Western figures intent on racking up trading victories are hilariously sent up in “Please Hello,” a Gilbert and Sullivan inspired number that nonetheless maintains the Japanese point of view on these bullying capitalists. In the song “A Bowler Hat,” Sondheim’s genius is unmistakable in the way he finds the truth of what’s been culturally lost and gained in a simple clothing metaphor. In “Next,” the show’s final number, he finds the perfect word to capture the unbridled pace of change.

Like the characters in “Pacific Overtures,” we too are living in interesting times, as the old curse euphemistically puts it. If you need another reason to see a revival that I cannot praise enough, let me add that this musical offers a profound glimpse of how history can overtake us, altering reality in ways that are hard to imagine. Sondheim and Weidman administer this lesson with musical theater poetry. Among this revival’s many virtues is its own impeccable historical timing.