A Conversation with Kelvin Moon Loh
on Pacific Overtures, Take Me To The World, and more
It’s a pleasure to welcome Kelvin Moon Loh to the Sondheim Hub. With credits including Beetlejuice, The King and I, SpongeBob SquarePants, Tick, Tick... Boom!, and the acclaimed Classic Stage Company revival of Pacific Overtures, Kelvin is one of the most thoughtful and passionate advocates for Sondheim’s work in the theatre community today. In the 50th anniversary year of Pacific Overtures, we spoke about his journey into Sondheim, his unforgettable performance of “Someone in a Tree” at the remote 90th birthday celebration, and what it meant to perform the show night after night in front of the man himself. Our conversation begins below:
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There’s so much to talk about — but I’d love to start with where you’re speaking from right now, and what you’re preparing for.
I am currently in Calgary, Canada. I’m working on a new musical called The Tale of the Gifted Prince. It’s written by Daniel Green and Leslie Wade. I’m in new musical land, and this one’s a fun little fantasy, reminiscent to me of Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It’s about a young prince who has to go on a journey and find some magical objects and deliver them in order to make his dreams come true.
Was Into the Woods your entry point into Sondheim?
I had a wonderful choir teacher in high school. This is a public school; I grew up on Long Island, New York. Sometimes, after we would finish our winter concerts, she would roll out a TV and that VHS, and she’d pop something in for us to watch. This is dating me... One of the things I remember watching was the professional recording of Sweeney Todd. I just remember sitting there with other public school kids who mostly were bored or taking a nap, and I went, what is happening? What am I watching?! At that point, I was addicted. It was not just my intro to Stephen Sondheim, but my intro to musical theatre at large — other than the few tiny musicals I did in school.
Fast forward to 2020, and you are one of the performers in “Someone in a Tree” for Sondheim’s 90th birthday celebration, Take Me To The World, which so many of our readers will recall. Can you take us inside how that remote performance came together?
What a wild ride. I was in Beetlejuice in March 2020, and we were sent home. I sat around my apartment for a couple of weeks — I thought it was only going to be a couple of weeks. At that time, there weren’t even a lot of virtual performances yet. Sondheim’s 90th birthday celebration was one of the first ones that everybody collectively watched.
I was reached out to by Paul Wontorek, who is over at Broadway.com, and also Mary-Mitchell Campbell, who’s a music director. They were saying that they were doing this fundraiser for ASTEP, for Sondheim’s birthday, and they knew that Ann Harada, myself, Austin Ku, and Thom Sesma had done the most recent Pacific Overtures that was down at Classic Stage. They said: “Do you think this is possible? What can we do here?” I think everybody was fairly new with the Zoom technology — what we could do, and the recording, and how we were going to put it all together.
At some point, we received this handwritten schematic, saying: you’re going to be in this box, and you’re going to be in this box, and you’re going to look up this way, you’re going to look down that way. Because we had performed the show together, we felt like we could try this as best we possibly could. We were sent tracks that we all shared, played in our ears, and then we recorded and sent back what we thought was our eye line to our scene partners who weren’t actually in the room — which is insane. And it turned out to be this beautiful creation.
There was one thing that I added that wasn’t part of the schematic. I said, “I just feel like I need to be underneath something.” Without any particular concept of being the warrior under the floor, I just had this table, and I said to my partner — we’re experimenting, we’re just seeing what we can do — “Honey, just stand over me, film me, I’m going to slide around the floor for a little bit, let’s see what that is. And at some point I’m just going to sit underneath the table.”
It felt like a safe space above me. I live in a not-so-glamorous one-bedroom apartment in New York City, so you always feel like you’re living underneath somebody or above somebody. The table felt like a proper addition, the right set piece. Paul and his editing team put it all together, and when we finally saw it, we went … whoa.
We couldn’t understand the impact of what we were doing when we were creating that video. And I think that mirrors the story of the people in “Someone in a Tree.” You don’t actually know that you’re living a moment of history while you’re living it. Even in the creation of that video, I didn’t know it was going to be watched by over a million people. At this point it may be over two million views. But also: just the moment we were living in, everybody being locked down, with very little outlet to view art or create art. So yes, we were all someone in a tree in that moment for that 90th birthday celebration.
As we think about the journey of Pacific Overtures across 50 years, it strikes me that your performance of “Someone in a Tree,” which is so easily accessible, might become a lot of people’s first touchpoint with that number, and maybe even that show.
Right. Pacific Overtures is not one of those shows that everybody knows. Everybody knows Into the Woods now, and everybody knows Sweeney Todd. Pacific Overtures still ends up being one of Sondheim’s more obscure pieces, even though the original production in all of its glory has been recorded and is very accessible.
For those watching that 90th birthday celebration, we were craving any kind of material. The way it was publicized, you had these amazing stars: Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Mandy Patinkin. You knew Bernadette was going to be there. I was freaking out that I got to be a part of it. Because of social media, and because of the creation and subsequent abolishment of cable television, it’s becoming more and more true that we don’t all watch the same thing anymore. I think the last time that we all watch something together is the Olympics, every two years. Where we used to say, “Hey, we’re watching this major event together,” that doesn’t happen anymore.
But on that particular evening, if you loved Stephen Sondheim, if you loved musical theatre, or had any passing interest, you gathered onto your computer, and we all collectively put our energy into watching those first thirty minutes — delayed, of course, because of technical things. Nobody had done a performance on that scale yet. But we all waited with bated breath, and so many of us watched all of it straight through. If you weren’t exposed to Pacific Overtures, you came to the table because you loved Patti LuPone, or you loved Into the Woods, or some Sondheim thing, and suddenly you’re exposed to: what is this song? Where is it from? And now I need to know more.
As many people have said, it’s been documented that Sondheim said it’s his favorite song. It is quite a masterpiece. If that’s the gateway drug into Pacific Overtures, I say take it. Take that gateway drug and get deep into it, because there’s a lot more amazing material inside that piece.
Which brings us beautifully to the full production you were part of. When the opportunity came to audition, did it feel like an elevated experience for you, given the esteem in which you held the show?
The shortest answer is yes, absolutely. You go to school, you want to study everything, and you realize that the pinnacle of all musical theatre writing comes from Stephen Sondheim. He was living at the time, and I thought to myself: my goal in life is to do as much Stephen Sondheim material as I possibly can. At that point in my career, I had not done any Sondheim outside of school.
I had been following John Doyle, too. I was a huge fan of his work, and I knew he was closely attached and worked directly with Sondheim. When I got the opportunity to audition for him, I said: I have to do it. I have to get it. It’s Classic Stage Company, which is a wonderful off-Broadway company. I said, I have to do this production, and I feel like this director is going to do something incredible with it. I was very lucky to be asked to be a part of it.
What I didn’t know was that John Weidman would be right there. What I didn’t know was that Jonathan Tunick would be right there, re-orchestrating the thing. And what I also didn’t know was that we would essentially be on a runway set — a kind of three-quarter thrust, but really a runway, where the seating capacity was maybe 200 or 300 seats. What I didn’t know was: you are going to be able to see every single face surrounding that runway. And on many nights, one of those faces would be Stephen Sondheim himself. Looking at you. Openly weeping while watching his show.
I don’t necessarily know why he was crying on many nights — and joyfully laughing too. Maybe part of it was the performance. Sometimes I fancy it might have been that. Or maybe it was just rediscovering the beauty of his piece every time he was able to watch it. And I think that is the beauty of Sondheim: it doesn’t matter how well you think you know it, or how many times you’ve performed the show, or how many versions you’ve seen. I hope I get to do other versions of Pacific Overtures in my career, because there’s always something new to discover about it. And I was able to watch him in his own discovery of what the piece had become.
I wonder if even somebody as prolific as Sondheim could have imagined that his material was going to be so revered, so produced, so reconceived and reimagined every single time. What a wonderful thing as an artist — not just to create pieces that everybody loves, but great work that everybody wants to collaborate with, outside of himself.
Weidman especially has always spoken very flexibly about Pacific Overtures, with a real spirit of generosity towards whoever is directing it, whoever is taking on these characters. From the inside, did you feel that freedom to experiment, to try things that might not work?
That production of Pacific Overtures got a lot of criticism for some of the cuts that John Doyle made. One very notable cut: the Shogun’s Mother’s song, “Chrysanthemum Tea.” It’s an absolute crowd favorite, and one of my favorite things.
I love John Doyle, and he would kill me if I didn’t mention his new book, Opening Doors: Reimagining the American Musical. And here’s the thing: part of his process was that he assembled the cast members without telling us who was playing what. There were things I sang in the audition room where I thought, surely I will be the Russian Admiral! But when we showed up in the rehearsal room, we didn’t do a read-through; we weren’t handed a sheet saying you’re going to play the Warrior, the Russian Admiral, this and that. We were just actors.
We started on the opening number, just walking around, creating in this amazing way that John directs. We weren’t given our character assignments, and a couple of us were very interested in playing the Shogun’s Mother. I myself wanted to play the role. I’m sure a lot of people in the cast were thinking, this is going to be my number — only to find out that he had cut it. We had no idea.
So, if you’re talking about flexibility from John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim — they already had an existing relationship, Sondheim and John Doyle, so: explain to me why you want to cut it, and then we’ll see if it works. John made a good argument: we don’t need this number to keep the show under a certain length, but it’s not just about time. This is one of the lessons John really taught me. He said, if you’re working on a revival of some sort, it’s your job to reexamine it.
Sometimes, because of how great Sondheim was as an artist, whenever I get to touch his material, it’s like I am a vessel of his divinity, a vessel of his otherworldly creations. If, in time, we find out that Stephen Sondheim was an alien — that he was not of this world, that he was here to teach us how music and words can collide and affect the soul — I would believe it. He was here to show us that.
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