Last night I caught opening night of a rare staging of Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, the musical hipsters love because you’ve probably never heard of it.
Any maybe rightly so. The story of the introduction of Western culture to Japan (written in 1976) was originally staged as Kabuki theatre with an all Japanese-American (and all-male) cast, a demographic that that many communities in the US are incapable of producing, so the group putting it on discarded the ethnicity requirements (and made the cast co-ed), and restaged the show without as many Kabuki elements, simultaneously making the show much more accessible and bringing it perilously close to being (unintentionally, I’m certain) offensive—the Japanese version of minstrelsy.
I’ve read at least one gushing semi-review, and the critics I was sitting near all seemed very congratulatory, but it left me appreciative, but largely unmoved, in spite of some really great individual moments.
Still, there are precious few opportunities to see the musical staged, especially here in the hinterlands, so the handful of Nashville theatre-types who read this should definitely check it out.
