Disclaimer: I have seen this musical performed on stage only once, several years ago. I’ve also listened multiple times to the soundtrack. That doesn’t qualify me to provide commentary, but I’m offering some anyway.
Many musicals have songs that are highly portable. “Maria” or “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story can be appreciated on first listen and enjoyed in multiple contexts, even if you wouldn’t gain a full appreciation without seeing the work as a whole. Most of the songs from Pacific Overtures, however, are like bricks built into a wall and can’t be pulled out and passed around separately. What would “Four Black Dragons” or “Please Hello” mean without the narrative structure around them? Even listening to the entire soundtrack may leave you puzzled if you haven’t seen it performed or read up on the background.
Pacific Overtures explores how Japan interacts, unwillingly, with the United States and European countries in the 1850s, based on actual events. The storyline is like a series of parallel moments that accumulate in separate stacks. And while there are characters we follow through the years, the real protagonist is probably the nation of Japan—not a location, but a cultural entity.
There’s a perfectly valid criticism to be made that the Japanese should be telling their own history instead of Harold Prince, John Weidman, and Stephen Sondheim doing it. In 1976, however, I doubt an authentically Japanese version was going to be put on a Broadway stage; and as I see it, Pacific Overtures is less a Westerner’s presentation of Japanese history and more a Westerner’s attempt to get other Westerners to think about Japan’s point of view. Then too, if you look at the original cast list you’ll see a high percentage of Asian names—something that today should be a given, but back then was not. This doesn’t excuse the musical for anything it gets wrong, but it indicates the producers were making an effort to avoid completely taking over someone else’s story.
• The first song, “Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea,” provides contextual information: the story starts in 1853, and Japan has been closed to foreigners for a long time. Japan has worked to preserve its own stability—politically, culturally, and technologically. Stability means avoiding change in order to keep things as they are. Elsewhere, “kings are burning,” but not here.
• The third song, “Four Black Dragons,” describes in apocalyptic terms the pivotal event disrupting everything and driving all that happens afterward. It’s a real, historical action that most U.S. citizens today have never heard of: Commodore Matthew Perry sailing U.S. warships into Japanese waters and demanding that Japan open its borders to trade. The concern here is economic—the U.S. wants to sell and buy goods, not to take over the Japanese government—but there is a very real and violent threat behind it. This is military force in the service of unscrupulous capitalism.
• It’s useful to know that Japan at the time had both an emperor and a shogun, and the real power was the shogun.
• “Chrysanthemum Tea” is sung by the shogun’s mother, who day by day prods her son to take charge and do something about a deadline imposed by Perry. Instead the shogun spends the day listening to spiritual advisors/soothsayers, who offer vague and unmotivating poetic pronouncements.
One of them invokes the kamikaze. Before its association with suicide pilots in World War II, kamikaze (typically translated “divine wind”) was the term for a massive storm that destroyed foreign invasion fleets, twice, saving Japan from conquest in the thirteenth century. That’s what he’s hoping will happen to take care of the U.S. threat.
• Interspersed with the high-level drama are two men, commoners: one who’s been to the U.S. and adores it and another with no interest in foreign things who only wants his simple life in Japan. The song “Poems” has the two of them waiting out the rain and passing the time in a kind of poetry contest. Each sings about his lady love: one about personified America, the other about his actual wife.
• For me the centerpiece of Pacific Overtures is “Someone in a Tree.” One person is trying to learn what exactly happened at the signing of the treaty/trade deal between Japan and the U.S.—the outcome is known, but what really went on in the treaty-house seems a mystery.
Two witnesses come forward. One was a boy in a tree who watched the event from a distance; he tells us the men were old, somebody was dressed a certain way, and the negotiators drank a lot of tea. In passing he mentions matting, which sounds meaningless but actually has a significance: mats were supposed to be covering the ground in order to uphold Japan’s rule that no foreigner could set foot on Japanese soil.
The other witness was beneath the treaty-house, and all he can say is what he heard. He starts off describing creaks and bumps and other noises above him and therefore sounds like an idiot: that’s not what anyone cares about, we want to know important things.
But it’s worth noting that the sole reason a man would be sitting under the treaty-house with a “sword inside its sheath” is so that if someone gave a certain signal he could leap up through a trap-door and slaughter the foreigners. By focusing on the sounds above, this man was doing his job; listening for the signal was precisely what he was supposed to do, and if he’d done it badly he could’ve thrown Japan into a disastrous war by murdering U.S. diplomats.
The song pokes fun at the boy and assassin for being clueless about what the questioner actually wants to know and for claiming to have seen or heard “everything” when each perceived only fragments. And yet the message of the lyrics is driven home with a powerful, unrelenting insistence that surely reveals an underlying sincerity. The small things are what really happens; what we call important is the buildup of what feels unimportant; tiny actions, tiny choices are the substance creating and moving the larger. We are history even when we don’t see it or know it at the time.
And ultimately the witnesses do tell us about the treaty negotiations: the boy and the assassin can’t repeat the exact words, but they report that the diplomats argued, drank tea, spoke of laws, went back and forth about what to give and what to get, paused to think. The testimony paints a clear picture of the event being a process, a string of moments: sometimes angry, sometimes not, punctuated with conflict here, hospitality there, with neutral discussion sprinkled in. It wasn’t all one thing or another, and smaller moments lead to the final result.
In Pacific Overtures we see things happening by degrees, beams becoming buildings. Perry’s arrival is one sudden upheaval, but the repercussions play out over years and years. Minds change. Resentments build. Even the chrysanthemum tea takes time.
• “A Bowler Hat” returns to the man who disregarded foreign things and loved his lady wife, portraying him over a span of time. In each verse he’s a bit older and a bit more Western.
How does someone who resisted Western culture come to embrace it? How does another person once infatuated with Westernization come to oppose it? Bit by bit. One piece at a time, over time.
• “Pretty Lady,” meanwhile, has a foreign sailor singing to a young woman in her garden when he passes her house. When I saw the play performed, this song was, musically, absolutely beautiful, with some of the most gorgeous singing in the whole production; yet the attitude betrayed by the lyrics is vile. “Give a lonely sailor half an hour,” and then he’ll go away without a care how his temporary pleasure affects the rest of your life, blissfully ignorant even of what it could mean in your culture. His vulgar proposition would’ve been offensive enough in 1850s America but was utterly unthinkable in 1850s Japan: this respectable young woman is not a prostitute, but he speaks to her like one. I suspect we’re meant to recall a line from the earlier song “Welcome to Kanagawa” noting that seabirds don’t know the difference between pine and bamboo.
• The final song, “Next,” glides over history into the 1970s, when Pacific Overtures first opened. It uses a series of quick, trivia-style statements to illustrate the radical change in Japan from the conditions described at the start of the musical. Japan was isolated; now it competes aggressively in global markets. Japan was pre-industrial; now it’s one of the most technologically advanced places on earth. A country that was forced to join the world economy now thrives near the top of it, in some ways surpassing the nation that bullied it into being there. (Japanese cars sold in Detroit, for instance.)
It’s interesting what’s left out here, though: in between the time of the story and the time the musical was produced, Japan shaped itself into a global military power, capable of conquering other countries and threatening world stability; then, after World War II, the U.S. forced Japan to give up its military. After compelling Japan to modernize, the Western world reversed that particular element of Japan’s modernization.
• I don’t know how significant it is that the musical was first performed in 1976, the Bicentennial year of the United States. A musical isn’t written in a day, and the uncertainties of funding and production mean creators might not have much control over when a work is finally put on stage. But at a moment when the U.S. was waving flags and cheering freedom, putting “Bicentennial Minutes” on TV, and celebrating an entire year like it was the Fourth of July, here was this Broadway production pointing to one of those times in the country’s past when the U.S. didn’t respect other people’s freedom or right to self-determination because economic gain seemed more important.
And acted without any idea what the long-term consequences would be.