A Conversation with Ethan Heard
On directing Pacific Overtures, Sunday in the Park with George, and more
Director Ethan Heard has spent much of his career drawn to questions of form under pressure: how classic works behave when their assumptions, their scale, their histories are tested. That sensibility was vividly on display in his 2023 production of Pacific Overtures at Signature Theatre, which foregrounded questions of power, perspective, and the long afterlife of American expansionism.
This week, we celebrate Pacific Overtures’ 50th anniversary. It was a treat to speak to Ethan about his Signature production, as well as his rich relationship with Sondheim’s work more generally. Our conversation begins below:
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It’s great to meet you. We’re talking on the cusp of the 50th anniversary of Pacific Overtures, and I’d love to start there. You directed the much-celebrated production at Signature Theatre in 2023, and I wonder, going into that, what your own relationship was like with the show. Where did it sit for you before you dived into it creatively?
It’s a pleasure to talk to you. I had seen two productions of Pacific Overtures before directing it. Signature had done it in the 90s. I saw that production with my mom, and then I saw John Doyle’s production at Classic Stage Company in New York, which was a cut-down, 10-actor version.
When Matt [Gardiner, Artistic Director of Signature Theatre] was dreaming up the Sondheim season after Sondheim’s death, he asked if I would direct Pacific Overtures, and I was thrilled. As a half-Asian person, I’ve always been interested in East meets West and that dynamic. I had directed a production of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly where I explored some of those themes, and I was fascinated to dive into the history of this piece.
I reached out to John Doyle, who I knew from teaching at Princeton together, and he kindly shared his cuts and some of the choices he had made. And John Weidman very graciously agreed to make some updates with us, because I wanted to bring the final song “Next” really into 2023. In 1976, obviously, Japan was in a different place, the United States was in a different place, and I wanted that song to bring us to the current situation, the current day.
Signature is such a wonderful black box in terms of reconfigurability. Pretty early on, I knew I wanted to stage the show as an island: for Japan to be the center and the audience to be the ocean. To really feel the invasion of the foreigners, and to feel that transgression when Commodore Perry comes back uninvited.
Were there moments during the process where you felt like you unlocked more of this show, or answered questions that you still had about it as a piece of art and how it interacts with audiences?
For sure. I felt quite empowered to look at Pacific Overtures critically. Weidman is beautifully modest about it and says, you know, we were white Jewish guys writing this in the 70s. I knew I wanted to bring on Japanese, Japanese American, Asian American collaborators. We wanted to ask deep questions of the show.
I was really proud to assemble a team that included a Japanese set designer, a Chinese costume and puppet designer, and a taiko drum expert. We got the biggest drum on the East Coast of America on stage, played by our associate music director. We had a samurai sword expert, and we had a Kabuki expert who was leading us in physical exploration, so I felt like we infused the process with Japanese culture.
I’ll give a particular shout-out to Helen Huang, our costume and puppet designer. We started talking about the Emperor as a puppet, which is how they did it in the original. And Helen had the kind of provocative idea that the girl in “Pretty Lady” be a puppet. Once I started thinking about it, I was like, oh, we could stage all the children as puppets. That girl is 15, the boy in the tree is 10, and the Emperor is, like, 1 and then 2 years old. The power dynamic inherent in puppeteering, I think, was exciting.
How much of a sense did you have of who Sondheim was when you first encountered his work as a kid, going to those productions at Signature?
It’s hard to remember exactly. From the beginning, I would always identify as a musical theatre nerd, so I think I was paying attention and trying to learn the lay of the land. I certainly knew my dad loved Lerner and Loewe, and I knew the names Rodgers and Hammerstein—so I think Sondheim must have been something like the fifth composer-lyricist name I learned.
But yeah, I saw Signature’s productions of Sunday in the Park, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney, too. And then by my senior year of high school, in 2002, the Kennedy Center was doing a Stephen Sondheim festival, which really has shaped me as an artist and a director. The fact that that event occurred at that time in my life, in my hometown, was so formative. Particularly when you’re younger, shows shape you. You learn them by heart, and idolize the particular performers you see, so I’m really happy that I was exposed in that way.
Signature came calling in 2022, exactly 20 years after that festival. I’d admired Signature Theatre for so long. It was the exact place I wanted to be next, because it does the musical theatre work so well, and in boundary-pushing ways. I think because we’re not doing it proscenium every time, as a director you have to roll up your sleeves and really look at the structure of the show. You have to find an architecture with your scenic designer that’s going to serve the show. And then, often, we’re looking at different orchestrations, or smaller casts, and that also forces you to excavate.
There’s a wonderful conversation between you and John Weidman that’s available to view online, and you touched on his creative generosity a little earlier. Are there any insights or discussion points that particularly stand out when you think back to your conversations with him as your production took shape?
It was such a gift to hear from him what he liked about various different stagings. He was so young when Hal Prince greenlit the show, and so he was sort of watching in awe as Hal put that first production together. And then, when a Japanese director tackled it, I believe that’s when the atomic bomb was incorporated into “Next.” I mean, how brilliant. It’s such an important event. You can’t just skip over it.
I knew I wanted to incorporate the atomic bombings in some way, and Weidman was very flexible in terms of saying, “Yeah, go for it. It’s in your hands. You can do what you want.” So our music director, Alexander Tom, looked at all the previous versions of “Next,” and we made our own. It was a combination of the original production, the revival on Broadway, and the Classic Stage Company version.
I was also really interested in updating the statistics and the spoken text that’s in “Next.” I wanted to bring it, as I said, into the 21st century, and I was interested in how “Next” is about capitalism. It’s this spinning engine of more: more consumption, more striving, more money. And you could argue that’s what America, or the West as a whole, infected Japan with.
Your Glimmerglass Festival production of Sunday was so well-received, and it’s hard to have a conversation about Sondheim without asking about that show. It’s a musical that we have such a specific idea of in our heads as audience members—even more so than Into the Woods or Sweeney, I think. How daunting is that as a director? How do you balance the reverence we all have for this piece, and for that original production, with the creative pull to get through to something new?
The short answer is that I do come from a place of reverence. I’ve certainly watched that original production multiple times, and I’ve pored over that album an infinite number of times. I so admire what Lapine did, especially as a first-time Broadway musical director and creator.
I had a eureka moment when I started thinking about Seurat as Prospero. I thought of him as a magician in charge of his island, so I wanted to expose and illuminate and play with Seurat’s sketching process. And while I head-over-heels love the original production, they do reveal the full scenic painting from the top. They go from white to an impressionistic colorful island right away. I was interested in the idea of sketches, the sketch pad, the charcoal, the gradual building to color—so that, to me, then the end of Act I has even more of a wow factor, because we’ve never seen all the color until that point.
And we came up with this idea of a proliferation of sketching and drafting that’s represented by multiple canvases or sketchpad images that then change into the one monolithic, large canvas. The original production was a little more literal. And I think it needed to be, in order to sell the whole concept of this very radical musical. So they needed to have a scrim with the incomplete painting represented on it. But in both of my productions, we decided on an empty frame that you could see through, for full access to the actor’s face. Asking the audience to imagine the painting in process was fun.
So the Prospero metaphor was really important. Taken a little further, I loved the meta-theatrical layer of theatre as art-making. And so the island becomes a stage, and then we can see the stage within the stage.
When you think ahead, are there Sondheim mountains that you still want to climb? Do you sit with specific ideas about, say, this is what I would do with that show, or does the project need to be more concretely in place for that part of your brain to start firing?
I definitely have unfinished business with some shows. I actually pitched a version of Sweeney to Sondheim, along with three actors. He wrote us back, and gave us reasons for why he didn’t think it was the best idea. It was thrilling just to get a long letter from him. But I do have some Sweeney thoughts…
Honestly, I’d love to do every single one, because they’re the best. If and when Here We Are becomes available, I’d be so excited about that. And it would be so exciting for there to be another festival, a little like that 2002 Kennedy Center festival, where we could all look at multiple Sondheim productions next to each other and see the connections. We do that all the time with Shakespeare. Why shouldn’t we do it with Steve?
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