ORIGINAL CHICAGO PRODUCTION - CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE

LONDON PRODUCTION- DONMAR WAREHOUSE

Pacific Overtures, Donmar Warehouse, London

Powerful reworking of Sondheim's musical of gunboats and kimonos

By Paul Taylor     01 July 2003

The Donmar Warehouse now unveils a revival of Pacific Overtures, the 1976 Stephen Sondheim musical that dramatises the ironic origins of Japan's hi-tech capitalist frenzy. In 1853, American gunboats, under the command of Commodore Perry, forced an end to Japan's 250 years of inward-looking isolation.

Director Gary Griffin's powerful vision of the piece is a re-staging for the Donmar of his acclaimed Chicago Shakespeare Theatre production. Unlike Hal Prince's lavish Broadway premiere (which lost its entire investment) or the overblown full operatic treatment it received at ENO, this version of Pacific Overtures is characterised by its expressive minimalism. The show is performed on a bare rectangular wooden stage, with the audience seated on all four sides. The multi-ethnic cast play multiple roles, with identifying details - the belt of a kimono; a sprig of blossom - added to near-identical outfits of basic black. This tactic throws great weight on the actors' gestures which are stylised to a sometimes deliberately parodic degree.

The production's stripped-back clarity heightens one's sense of just how peculiar and complicated a piece this is. Sondheim is not offering a straightforward account of the way Japan was opened up to foreign influence. Instead, he gives us a Western composer's idea of how it might be dramatised from the Japanese point of view. The resulting weird American-kabuki hybridisation reaches a climax at the end of the first half when Commodore Perry is presented, in the Japanese perception of him, as a mane-thrashing demon lion-king with a stars-and-stripes topper who turns his traditional dance into a vindictive assertion of US superiority, shifting from kabuki stomps to a high-kicking American cakewalk.

It's a musical of ideas more than of character and, at times, the proceedings can feel a little desiccated. But the excellent cast pitch the material with poetic delicacy and comic vigour. At the end, the show leaps from the 19th century to the present. There is now a reference to 11 September, telling us that in 2002 the Japanese defence force was sent abroad for the first time in the aftermath of that atrocity. An explosion briefly evokes Hiroshima. These additions complicate the musical's original message that Japan learnt its expansionist techniques from the West all too well. An admirably considered reworking of a provocative piece.

Pacific Overtures  Donmar Warehouse, London

Michael Billington

Wednesday July 2, 2003

The Guardian

Small is not only beautiful, it is invariably better for Stephen Sondheim musicals. And the joy of Gary Griffin's production, hailing from the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and using 10 actors and four musicians, is that it allows us to savour every word and register every dramatic nuance in a way that is impossible in glitzier revivals.

Seeing this 1976 show again, one is struck by its extraordinary topicality, not just of Sondheim's lyrics, but of John Weidman's book. It deals with Commander Perry's use of military force to persuade Japan to open up trade relations in 1853 and, at a time of resurgent American imperialism, it is fascinating to hear Perry referring to "these backward-seeming, semi-barbarous peoples". It also comes as a shock to be reminded that the British, French and Russians who leapt on the American bandwagon were met with fierce resistance by samurai warriors.

This is a nakedly political musical. But the genius of Sondheim's music and lyrics is the way they move from Oriental minimalism to multinational pastiche as Japan becomes more westernised. In the achingly beautiful first half, we listen entranced as a samurai and a fisherman exchange haikus as they travel. And in Someone in a Tree, we see how history is made up of fragmentary moments and multiple perspectives. But, by the time the invading admirals arrive, Sondheim precisely parodies Sousa, Sullivan and Offenbach to pinpoint cultural invasion.

You could argue that the second act over-compresses 20th-century history, and that the final point about Japan's economic revenge is less true than it was. But this is still a great musical that satirises America's historical determination to impose its values on other civilisations.

Griffin's production, played on a rectangular pinewood stage, embraces the austerity of noh as much as the colour of kabuki theatre and is quite outstandingly acted by its all-male cast. Joseph Anthony Foronda's Reciter not only holds the show together, but views the unfolding history with wry, cool omniscience. Jerome Pradon is wonderfully poisonous as the Shogun's mother. And in the great song about history seen from a tree, Togo Igawa and Mo Zainal touchingly represent the polarities of youth and age, and make nonsense of the old canard that Sondheim is a cold composer. This musical ripples with felt emotion.