Rarely performed Sondheim musical speaks volumes in our tariff era

San Francisco Chronicle​

31-05-2025

To feel the scourge of imperialism, listen to a song that doesn't dictate feeling at all.
In the musical 'Pacific Overtures,' an unlikely governor in Japan ticks off the Western imports that have wormed their way into his life since Americans forced open his country to trade in 1853. 'It's called a bowler hat,' Kayama (Nick Nakashima) sings in Kunoichi Productions' show, his eyes wary yet curious as he regards the foreign object. Two verses later: 'It's called a pocket watch.'
Before long, the samurai is looking for his own bowler hat, drinking too much white wine and replacing his sword with a pistol. Stephen Sondheim's lyrics stay light and jagged, and his music sounds like waves heaving back and forth, thrashing the passage of time. Suddenly, a way of life is gone, a man transformed, and all it took was a song.
That's one of the finest moments in the rarely performed show, which opened Friday, May 30, at Brava Theater. Another comes shortly before, when nobles warn Lord Abe (Lawrence-Michael C. Arias) about the growing population of Westerners in their midst. Their method is to have a storyteller deliver a fable, in the ritualized style of traditional Japanese theater, about a young king on a hunting party who thinks he's encountering a tiger, only to be confronted by a pack of beastly men.
Herein, actor Ryan Marchand glides about the stage in swooshing steps, sweeping his arms in surgically precise arcs. In a drawn-out chant, his voice mines the lower depths of his body cavity, resounding like a hollow redwood, and ratchets up in pitch to transport the whole stage to some kind of liminal space, like we're listening to an emissary from the beyond. His hyper-focused gaze practically has physical force. It's as if he pictures very specifically all the long-term ramifications of opening borders to the West, and he's holding you in place till you see it, too.
The show isn't an easy one, though. Often, Sondheim's score doesn't ingratiate itself with the ear. If you're not well schooled in dissonant music, it can be difficult to pick out what distinguishes his chords from a random mashing of fist against keys.
And while Nick Ishimaru's direction contains some flashes of genius, including othering the infringing Americans as caricatures by costuming them in garish masks, staging feels incomplete. When Kayama and his wife Tamate (Sarah Jiang) fret about his impossible-seeming mission to keep the Americans offshore, lest they taint sacred Japanese soil, it's as if the actors haven't been told to either move or stay still, so they hover in an unsatisfying in-between state.
Singers muddle their pick-ups and cut-offs. Breath support staggers, the musical equivalent of water instead of soup. In the repetitive song 'Someone in a Tree,' the actors fail to justify why one character, recalling his observation of the first meeting of the Japanese and Americans, sings that he was 'younger then' six times. Sitting in the audience, you start to dream up possibilities. Maybe he's senile. Maybe he's overexcited or fond of hearing his own voice. Maybe his listener would be indulgent at first, since she yearns to hear his tale, only to grow confused, then impatient, then exasperated. But the actors don't explore these possibilities or any other, probably better ones. Each iteration feels the same.
Still, in our own era of tariffs and isolationism frankensteined to would-be imperialism (see Greenland, Canada and the Gulf of Mexico), the 1976 musical makes for a provocative revisit. Closed borders relegate the rest of the world to 'somewhere out there.' Open borders sully or sever connection with heritage. But history, 'Pacific Overtures' suggests, tends to move only in one direction. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, so open with care.