Here's my odd confession about Stephen Sondheim: when I first discovered Sweeney Todd, I was so dazzled by it, so overwhelmed by how close it came to artistic perfection, so struck by its completeness, that it took me quite a while to explore & appreciate the rest of Sondheim. (I am still surprised when I meet people who have some other favorite Sondheim musical, or even some other favorite musical, or who can't sing, however poorly, the entire score). I did make one exception, though: Pacific Overtures, a work I also loved immediately & have wanted to see on stage for years, though I'm also aware of the dangers of such wishes; after wanting for many years to see one of Federico Garcia Lorca's plays on stage, I went to Yerma at Shotgun Players a couple of years ago, & I'm still reeling from their clueless travesty (my entry on it is here).
So I was both excited & filled with my standard anxiety when I was wandering down Haight Street one day last month & saw a poster advertising a production of Pacific Overtures, by Kunoichi Productions. I had never heard of them before, which is why I had to find out about the show from a poster, which is yet another reason it's good to wander. It turns out Kunoichi Productions is a new local group, dedicated to "bold, innovative multidisciplinary theater with Japanese aesthetics, blending the ancient and the modern, using both comedy and philosophy while fusing Eastern and Western theatrical elements"; kunoichi means female ninja; & you can find that information & more at their website here.
I ended up making it to the show's final performance, which was yesterday afternoon, & I am glad I did not skip it, as it turned out to be a very good production, really impressively good, considering the challenges of putting on this complicated work & what I assume are the group's limited resources (as we all know, these are difficult times even for established arts groups, let along scrappy start-ups, so, again, kudos to them for taking on & rising to such a big challenge).
Given Kunoichi's interests, staging Pacific Overtures as their first full production was an astute yet bold choice, as the piece straddles & explores different worlds & power structures, showing how they interact, intersect & clash, & how their inhabitants change or refuse to change during cross-cultural confrontation. Despite all it has to offer, this show isn't done that often, I'm not sure why. I assume the need for an all or mostly Asian cast hinders some, but certainly in this area there's no lack of qualified talent. As I've mentioned, it's a complicated show, but that comes with being a Sondheim show, & his is a name that is now a draw for a sizable group (I can't speak to the rest of the run, of course, but yesterday the house was almost full, & very attentive & enthusiastic).
Pacific Overtures has some of my favorite Sondheim numbers, such as the exquisite There is no other way & one of my all-time favorites, Chrysanthemum Tea, a song which manages to be both witty & tragic, as well as advancing the plot, giving us some history & cultural context, & revealing the personalities of all involved, which makes it, obviously, a triumph of the musical-comedy stage. ("Musical comedy" is a term used only for convenience here, as this show's subject, the opening of Japan by Commodore Perry & his American warships, is not a topic that would suggest, to most people, the makings of a Broadway musical.) The score also contains the song Sondheim once said was his personal favorite, Someone in a Tree, a complicated, multi-voiced narrative about . . . well, many things, but not quite grasping what we supposedly witness is a major part of it.
First I am going to complain about something, but this is my complaint every time I see a musical: the entire show was amplified. Given the relatively small performance space (La Brava Theater, which I had not been to before, despite many years of theater-going; it turned out to be a welcoming space, with the shabby-chic Art-Deco elegance of a former movie palace, which it is), one that an actor's voice should be able to fill, it was a shame that they didn't take advantage of the possibilities for intimacy & subtlety that come with a natural speaking voice. Amplification flattens & distorts tones, removes lower-volume possibilities, & in some ways reduces the audience's attention, as they don't have to listen as carefully. And the little microphones taped to the performers' faces are ugly & distracting. I say all this knowing full well that the use of amplification is going to continue, of course. I just wish it were not so automatic when singing is involved.
Taped-on face mikes aside, this was a very attractive production. The costumes were especially impressive, & astutely done: when the brothel-keeper comes out with her gaggle of crude farm girls, half of whom were comically played by men, to perform Welcome to Kanagawa, the countrified geishas' outfits were notably more garish than anyone else's, done in overly bright shades of pink & green & other electric colors. (This comic scene is balanced later in the drama by one in which three British sailors approach a young girl they think is a geisha, leading to unwanted advances from them that end in the death of one of the sailors by the girl's father, a scene performed in this production with great delicacy & menace.) The more aristocratic Japanese were in refined dark blues & browns. Commodore Perry, done up like something approaching a Kabuki demon, wore a glistening jacket of stars & stripes, accompanied by two American sailors with grotesque "white people" masks, making them look both swinish & babylike.
There was a lot of movement, clearly based in Japanese theatrical traditions, which the performers seemed quite expert in (in other words, their movements looked natural & expressive, & not like something they had studied just for the occasion), as well as several choreographed dance numbers, all handled with aplomb. Clever use was made of the single set, a multi-level Japanese-style house, & of the auditorium itself, as characters entered or exited through the aisles (causing those of us in the front row to be cautious about extending our legs out!).
It was fascinating to see, finally, something I've been so familiar with through recordings, because of course most recordings don't give you the full show – there are narrative bits, expository bits done with dialogue, that reveals important context for the familiar songs. I have a bad habit of listening to recordings & not necessarily reading all the liner notes, or the plot summaries, so it sometimes takes a while for me to understand exactly what's happening (and in the recording of the original Broadway cast, as part of the work's incorporation of traditional Japanese theatrical techniques, the women's parts are played by men, which further complicates things if you're not reading along; in the recording of the Broadway revival, women play the women's roles, & in this production they did as well, though there's also some cross-gender casting, as mentioned earlier).
Parts of the story, particularly towards the end, were clearer to me than they ever had been before. There were also moments when I wasn't sure if I picked up on something because it was clear, or because at some level I already knew what was going on; for example, during Someone in a Tree, one of the narrators is an old man, one whose mind is possibly starting to slip, who tries to recall what he heard & saw on that long-ago day, when he climbed up a tree & saw into the treaty-house – he's very chatty, & very repetitious, but the important details elude him. The actor in this role skillfully conveyed the character's age, but was it that I was already aware enough of it to pick up on his rather subtle indications? (I have this same situation with Shakespeare productions, especially heavily cut ones: does the story still make sense as they tell it, or do I just know the material so well I'm supplying the lacunae?) (And for the record, the other narrators in Someone in a Tree are the old man's younger self (much younger, as they keep reminding us), a warrior who had been hidden under the floorboards of the treaty house, & the Reciter, our guide through the evening & the history.)
The big comedy number, Say Hello, in which representatives from foreign powers keep showing up, each bearing gifts & menace, & each characterized with musical cleverness by Sondheim (the British representative patters à la Gilbert & Sullivan, the French diplomat is filigreed with a bit of Offenbach), was very cleverly done by the group. As you'd expect with Sondheim, there's a lot of cleverness (the wordplay doesn't stop with the title). And as you'd also expect with Sondheim, if you know his work rather than his reputation (or at least his former reputation), there's a deep reservoir of emotion being drawn on. Some of the characters make only brief appearances (the wife of the low-level samurai at the beginning, for instance) & some have major arcs (the fisherman who, capsized at sea, ended up spending time in Massachusetts, who later returned to warn the Japanese about Perry's ships) that end up in surprising places, but their sorrows, their anger & confusion, provide the human spine to the history, all well conveyed by these players.
The final song, Next, Next, an urgent, on-rushing, speedy look at the changes in Japan after the Meiji Emperor decides to assert his supremacy & lead his country victoriously into the modern world, was astutely updated. There was a flash at one moment that I took to be a reference to the dropping of the atomic bomb. One of the performers at the very end was dressed in an anime-cosplay style, which is certainly a huge part of Japan's current influence but not something that would have been noted, certainly not noted as a major cultural marker for the USA, when the musical premiered in this mid-1970s.
There were no printed programs handed out, & I understand the cost-savings there, but I wish they had at least given us a single sheet. There was a QR code you could scan, but I'm just not going to do that. But Kunoichi Productions's website did give the credits, so here they are, though unfortunately I don't see listings for the set, lighting, & costume designers:
Lawrence-Michael C. Arias as Abe
Faustino Cadiz III as Swing
Keiko Shimosato Carreiro as the Reciter
Edward Im as the Boy
Sarah Jiang as Tamate
Stephen Kanaski as the Warrior
Ryan Marchand as Perry
Eiko Moon-Yamamoto as the Shogun's Mother
Nick Nakashima as Kayama
Vinh G. Nguyen as Manjiro
Mayadevi Ross as the Madame
Julia Wright as Swing
Directed by Nick Ishimaru
Music Direction by Diana Lee
Choreography by Megan and Shannon Kurashige of Sharp & Fine
Cultural Advising by Ken Kanesaka
Dramaturgy by Ai Ebashi
Good job all, & I look forward to seeing what Kunoichi Productions comes up with next.
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