Cultural Fine-Tuning of ‘Pacific Overtures’

NEW YORK--Contrived by a master of the double negative, Stephen Sondheim’s saucy satires of what we aren’t often end up celebrating what we are. So, there’s a certain Sondheimian logic that “Pacific Overtures,” his 1976 show about the Westernization of Japan from Commodore Perry’s invasion in 1853 to the present, became Sondheim’s brazen, backhanded celebration of the American bicentennial. If the ugly American begets even uglier Japanese, then maybe we don’t look so bad after all.

Nonetheless, the convoluted cultural layers of “Pacific Overtures” bewildered Broadway the first time out, with Harold Prince’s mock-Kabuki production, an all-Asian cast (including the American roles), men impersonating women (as in traditional Japanese theater) and the allusions in the score to classical Japanese court music. But all of that is surface, artifice.

The harsh, unsupported wooden flute sound of the shakuhachi immediately gives way to pungent, honeyed harmonies and wickedly clever wordplay--a sweet and sour mix more American sucker punch than aromatic Asian blend. Sondheim’s snappy timing, even when conveying an exchange of haiku poems, has a kind of New York street rhythm.

Or at least it did. The Lincoln Center Festival, which this year is heavily weighted toward Asian and Middle Eastern work, imported a Japanese “Pacific Overtures” for five performances that ended Saturday. Two years ago, a popular Tokyo choreographer and stage director, Amon Miyamoto, created this production not only with John Weidman’s book and Sondheim’s lyrics translated into Japanese, but giving the show an outright Japanese sensibility.

In a program note, Miyamoto explains that it was more the gaudy Prince production than “Pacific Overtures” itself that proved problematic to the Japanese people. His solution was to strip the work to bare bones, turning to the cultivated, ancient tradition of Noh theater. There is a simple, graceful wood set, framed by wooden beams (on which English translations are projected). A long runway that extends from the stage deep into the orchestra seats of Avery Fisher Hall is used for the American invaders. An ensemble of seven aggressively amplified musicians sits atop the set.

Perverse as ever, Sondheim has said he loves this production, calling it a combination of Peter Brook and Jerome Robbins. Miyamoto’s concept is often theatrically brilliant, his cast highly accomplished and the production far more sophisticated than the coarse special effects typical of today’s Broadway musical.

But in making “Pacific Overtures” palatable for the Japanese, Miyamoto makes it newly disconcerting for the American.

Little seems to be what it is. Words no longer fit the music. Characters sing of unsullied nature in secluded, pre-Perry Japan, but Sondheim’s score is given the glitzy arrangements heavy on winds, electronic keyboard and percussion that make it sound like all-purpose international pop. That effect is further enhanced by amplification that often makes it difficult to tell who is singing.

Members of Commodore Perry’s party are portrayed as Edo-period demons, in scary masks with huge noses. Yet the transforming Westernization that Perry brought ultimately takes on an outright celebratory air. The ending number, “Next,” showing a Japan of unstoppable progress, is a masterpiece of fluid choreography (Miyamoto’s Robbins moment), the dance accumulating energy as it progresses from historic times through Hiroshima to the modern (Miyamoto updates the drama with references to Pokemon and Sept. 11). As a spectacular introduction to that finale, Takeharu Kunimoto, the reciter, does a show-stopping routine in which he transforms a traditional three-stringed shamisen into a banjo.

Miyamoto creates many more moments of theatrical astonishment. Each member of the cast has several roles and moves with willowy grace, again a striking contrast to superficial Broadway’s steroid-injected high-energy. The slapstick, for which Miyamoto has a weakness, reveals a cultivated polish.

Even so, such stylized theater is not particularly effective at realizing Sondheim’s gift for specificity, to say nothing for his rapid-fire double-entendres. The hilarious sendup of national musical styles in “Please Hello,” where the Americans are followed by the Dutch, Russians and French in forcing access to Japan, falls flat. Nor does Miyamoto seem altogether bemused by the more cutting caricatures of the Japanese. Geishas frolic nervously ( “Welcome to Kanagawa”); the poisoning of the ineffectual shogun (by his mother, no less), lacks wit (“Chrysanthemum Tea”).

But Miyamoto’s real revenge is simply the high quality of his work.

Rather than bemoaning Japan’s becoming more materialistic than the American example, he lionizes the Japanese ability to better us at our own game. As Western tourists quickly find out, the Japanese versions of American operations are always better.

Order a Starbucks’ cappuccino in Tokyo and it won’t be that milky, burnt beverage you invariably get in New York (and often elsewhere); instead, it is as attentively, as perfectly made as tea for a tea ceremony. Likewise, Japan’s “Pacific Overtures” is so attentive that you cannot help but be impressed, whatever it is trying to say.