Pacific Overtures Arrives in Japan
A second opening...
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Pacific Overtures is, famously, a musical about an opening.
Opening can mean contact, can mean curiosity, can mean exchange. It can also mean coercion. And in Sondheim and Weidman’s show, the word is never innocent. A port is opened; a country is opened; a culture is opened to commerce, diplomacy, gunpowder, etiquette, and threat. The musical keeps worrying away at the same question: who gets to describe this process, and in whose language?
That question did not end at the Winter Garden Theatre.
The original Broadway production of Pacific Overtures opened on 11 January 1976 and closed on 27 June, after 13 previews and 193 performances. Before the end of that run, the production was videotaped at the Winter Garden. That recording later had its own afterlife: an American Broadway musical about Japan’s forced opening to the West crossed the Pacific and was broadcast on Japanese television with subtitles.
How should we categorize this? We’re not talking of a revival, nor of a new staging. What we’re considering here is, perhaps, something more intriguing: a kind of second opening. Let’s take a closer look.