Overtures from the Other Side of the Pacific

By Hitomi Hagio

The Lincoln Center Festival in New York will host a Japanese-language production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1976 musical Pacific Overtures, which premiered in the fall of 2000 at Tokyo’s New National Theater. The show appears at the festival July 9-13. 

The New National Theater of Tokyo has completed its first musical. One might think there would be an interesting parallel to be drawn between this Japanese-language production’s finally opening the door to American musical theatre and the opening of Japan described in Pacific Overtures—but the similarity is just a coincidence.

Pacific Overtures first appeared on Broadway in 1976, at the height of Japan’s economic “invasion” of America. The director Harold Prince used these conditions to highlight the events of the past, and the show’s final number, “Next,” contains some irony now that the invader has become the invaded. A quarter of a century has passed and the political climate and economic conditions have changed—so how does a Japanese director handle a work that was written from an American point of view?

In the end, director Miyamoto Amon pulls it off quite skillfully. The concept of the work is embodied in the idea of “a floating island,” first represented visually by Matsui Rumi’s stage design. The foreigners enter the noh-style stage by way of a specially constructed walkway that extends over a trough of water into the audience, effectively creating the feeling of the actual first landing in Japan. The foreigners are all symbolized by the masks they wear, and they become, so to speak, the very concept of “foreign pressure.” An unusual cast, including a rokyoku narrator played by Kunimoto Takeharu and a supporting group of solid actors, make the play exceptionally lifelike. 

What a difference there is between the lively and energetic Japan of the mid-’60s-to-mid-’70s and the Japan of today, which has been flustered by the outside pressure of global standards. But when you think about it, mid-19th-century Japan at the time of Perry’s arrival and Japan today are similar in many ways—so I was expecting “Next” to describe contemporary Japan as a drifting island that had lost its map and engine. 

In reality, what was sewn into the number “Next” was the image of a Japan that had experienced a world war and the atomic bomb. Along with the figure of the “floating island” that continued to push forward came the sadness that it must change and once again be unavoidably destroyed.

Hitomi Hagio’s commentary on Pacific Overtures first appeared in Japan in Musical Performance Review and Tokyo Shimbun

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