This San Francisco director is reimagining Sondheim's ‘Pacific Overtures' with a Japanese perspective

San Francisco Chronicle​

4 days ago

Nick Ishimaru is used to speaking up and speaking out. Before a 2023 San Francisco Opera performance of ' Madame Butterfly,' the San Francisco theater producer and director was invited to a pre-opera talk at the War Memorial Opera House where he praised the Puccini masterpiece on aesthetic levels but called out the cultural inaccuracies and controversies inherent to the 1904 work.
Audience members expecting a dressy night out at the opera didn't respond well to the contextual breakdown, which included his assessment that Puccini equated geishas — who are trained entertainers and performing artists — as sex workers.
'To say I was not kind about 'Madame Butterfly' would be an understatement,' Ishimaru told the Chronicle on a video call from his home near Dolores Park. 'I've never felt more threatened in a physical space than I did when I finished that talk.'
Since then, Ishimaru and his Kunoichi Productions team have had a different Japan-set story in their sights: John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim's 'Pacific Overtures.' The musical, which begins performances Friday, May 30, at Brava Theater, is set during an historic moment in the 19th century when American ships led by Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay and forcibly opened Japan to foreign trade and the outside world.
'It's a foundational moment in Japanese history that Americans basically know nothing about,' Ishimaru said.
'Pacific Overtures' is built around an unlikely friendship between a samurai named Kayama and an Americanized fisherman named Manjiro. Despite Sondheim's Broadway chops ('Sweeney Todd,' among others), this work is rarely revived. Its script is challenging and has a nonlinear story that involves a subject that, at best, appears as a footnote in American history textbooks.
But Ishimaru, a fourth-generation Japanese American, is uniquely qualified to give the original a 2025 remix. He's trained in multiple disciplines of American and Japanese theater. He served as artistic director of San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen, which continues the Japanese tradition of Noh drama and Kyogen comedy, from 2016 to 2019.
He's also well-versed in that historic 1853 moment of gunboat diplomacy between the U.S. and Japan, studying it extensively when working on his master's in drama at San Francisco State University.
'That's what I cling to as a Japanese American and why I want to tell this particular story,' he said. 'It's really the first time America and Japan interact, and it's something all generations of Japanese Americans have in common.'
The original 1976 Broadway cast featured Japanese American actors Mako, Sab Shimono and even a pre-'Sixteen Candles' Gedde Watanabe. The 2025 Brava Theater revival features a diverse cast that takes a fresh approach, with input from classically trained kabuki artist Bandō Hirohichirō. But while it's informed by and written with traditional kabuki aesthetics, Ishimaru stresses the production is not a traditional performance. The singers aren't all male or male-identifying, a kabuki prerequisite.
His 'Pacific Overtures' also shifts Weidman and Sondheim's lens to one that prioritizes the Japanese perspective. The U.S. delegation wears masks, which gives them an alien-like feel, while the Japanese do not, allowing them to express more natural emotions like ambivalence rather than certainty. These changes reflect a sensitivity in ways that 'Madame Butterfly' does not, giving Japanese characters more humanity and depth.
'To me, the show is about how we navigate our relationship to our ancestry and understanding of our own selves,' said Ishimaru.
Music Director Diana Lee, who lives in Berkeley and whose recent credits include 'Rent' at Hillbarn Theatre in Foster City and 'The Scottsboro Boys' at 42nd Street Moon in San Francisco, pulled from her Rolodex to assemble a tight seven-piece orchestra with keyboards, violin, cello, French horn, reeds, percussion and a Japanese koto.
'A lot of musicians really wanted to play this show,' said Lee, who noted many reached out to her as word spread about the revised production. 'It's a new experience to see another work from the Sondheim canon that's rarely done.'
For the show-stopping number 'Someone in a Tree,' which is widely known as Sondheim's favorite from all of his musicals, Ishimaru merges the original three-member dialogue — a conversation between a man, his younger self and another witness describing the negotiations between the Japanese and Americans — into one perspective. Ishimaru explains that it allows the piece to come to life.
'We let the music, which is the most glorious song in the show, carry the imagery,' Ishimaru explained, noting that that approach allows the piece to come to life.
With its themes of imperialism and the fall of an empire, Ishimaru believes 'Pacific Overtures' feels even more relevant now than when it came out in 1976. 'Next,' a number that describes environmental catastrophe, is a prime example. 'Never mind a small disaster/ Who's the stronger, who's the faster?' goes the chorus.
'It's scary how relevant the lyrics of that particular number are to today and how much that trajectory just lands now,' said Ishimaru. 'I know many people here in San Francisco are concerned about the collapse of our own nation and the end of the American experiment. Did we drive ourselves here by unchecked capitalism? Is oligarchy what we're facing? Is the threat that America presented to Japan in 1853 ultimately coming home to roost, not just in Japan, but here in the States?