Pacific Overtures at 50
50 years ago today, Pacific Overtures opened on Broadway
Fifty years ago today—January 11, 1976—Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre opened its doors for the first performance of Pacific Overtures. Outside, a bitter New York winter; inside, a company preparing to transport the audience across an ocean and back through time.
Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman had crafted something audacious: a musical told through the traditions of Kabuki theatre, that dared to examine American imperialism from the perspective of those it had irrevocably changed. The story of Commodore Perry’s 1853 arrival in Japan and the forced opening of a nation became, in their hands, a meditation on cultural destruction, identity, and the price of “progress.” As the evening unfolded, the opening-night audience watched a society transform before their eyes.
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The show would run for 193 performances over six months. But Pacific Overtures proved to be that rarest of things: a work that grows more relevant with time, its questions more urgent, its warnings more prescient.
Today, let’s raise a glass to this extraordinary show on its golden anniversary. And let’s do so in a way that takes its cue from “Someone in a Tree.” Below, a tapestry of voices and perspectives: memories of those who attended the original production, discoveries made decades later, productions that left their own imprints, reflections on the show’s legacy. Each a fragment, not a day. We can hear them now…
Voices Across Five Decades
When the curtain rose at the Winter Garden in January 1976, some in the audience knew immediately they were witnessing something extraordinary. Robert Kahan, attending during previews, would return sixteen more times. “As soon as I saw the three musicians start the show, and then Mako commanding the stage and that great opening number, I knew I’d be back again,” he recalls. Stephen Gonya, already a devoted Sondheim fanatic at 22, saw it three times that original run. The show held, he says, “a special place in my heart because of its unique story and the brilliant score.”
David Caldwell remembers encountering the show even earlier, during its Boston pre-Broadway run. At the time, he recalls, the hanamichi still ran straight down the middle of the orchestra. During intermission, Caldwell approached Sondheim for an autograph—only for the pen to run out. Sondheim found another and inscribed the programme with a dry aside: “Not an omen, I hope.”
Steven Gore, then a Yale sophomore who caught Pacific Overtures in previews, was so moved—and so incensed by Clive Barnes’s review—that he wrote an unpublished letter to the New York Times. “Clearly he missed the whole point of the show,” Gore argues, “that as the traditional Japanese culture gives way to U.S. cultural hegemony and consumerism, the style of the show morphs from high Kabuki style to gross U.S. industrial show.” Later that fall, when Sondheim visited Yale for a production of Anyone Can Whistle, Gore seized the chance to ask how he’d achieved the show’s Japanese musical textures. Sondheim, Gore says, “talked about laying different materials across the piano strings to simulate the traditional instruments. He was a great teacher and amazingly kind.”
For those who discovered Pacific Overtures decades later, the show’s impact proved no less profound. Zach Hoffman first heard “Someone In A Tree” on a live concert album in 2019, “with little to no context,” and found himself “covered in goosebumps.” When Alejandro Rueda Sanz in Madrid first encountered the same song during his research into Sondheim’s work, he was “left in pure shock and awe at just how good and how human the experiences told were.” Alexander from Miami echoes this: the song “never fails to move me to tears. The entire idea of the old man knowing that if the day didn’t happen, he wasn’t there and if he was there, the day happened. The way history is made up not of just the winners but everyone who was there—and even if no one else knows, he knows, and doesn’t that make all the difference?”
For some, discovery came with surprise of a different kind. Jacob Ulric remembers attending the 2017 revival, assuming that Pacific Overtures was a World War II musical—only then learning that there are, in fact, two very different “Pacific” shows. Barry Schilmeister recalls a different moment from that 1976 Winter Garden production. During “Chrysanthemum Tea,” when the Shogun’s mother sang, “If the tea the Shogun drank will / Serve to keep the Shogun tranquil,” Schilmeister “sat bolt upright” in his seat. “I thought, ‘what did she say? Can you DO that?’” Only years later did he learn that Sondheim had anticipated precisely this reaction, writing in Finishing the Hat that rhymes with different spellings surprise the brain more because we subliminally see them in print. “I will never forget how that lyric reached out from the stage and grabbed me,” Schilmeister says.
The Show’s Ingenuity
Ryan G. from Indiana marvels at “the creative theatricality of every song in the show. No two songs are told in the same way.” He traces the varied perspectives: a narrator, observers, thieves confused about what these great ships are, the Shogun’s mother updating him, exchanged poems. Each song, he argues, functions as “a brush stroke creating the picture of a country which is slowly losing itself as time progresses.”
“Please Hello” stands out for many as the apex of Sondheim’s wit and craft. Marcus Ho calls it “maybe my favorite song from all of musical theater! The ingenuity of the rhymes, the musical pastiches, the satiric commentary on Western colonialism, that six-part counterpoint at the end—I could go on. It’s very reminiscent of Tom Lehrer.” Karen U., who performed in an ambitious high school production in 1989 New Hampshire, describes how the song “just always blows me away with its ability to explain politics and colonialism while being outrageously funny.” Augustine Muraski confesses, “I listened to ‘Please Hello’ in the shower for a month until I could recite every word in time with the music. The Brit was the hardest part.”
For Rueda Sanz, the British section exemplifies what he loves: “I’m a very big fan of patters, and a massive fan of wordplay, and I love how Sondheim is capable of breaking up words in order to create twice the number of rhymes. When I first heard it, I was literally left speechless.”
Not the Building, But the Beam…
The show’s journey beyond Broadway has been rich. Paul Moylan played in the orchestra for the recent Menier Chocolate Factory production in London and found it “just so beautiful to play. It was the one-act version and I missed the cut bits, but it was still wonderful.” Mary Ellen Clark saw three notably different productions: the 2002 Japanese version at Lincoln Center (“stunning”), the B.D. Wong revival, and Signature Theatre’s 2023 production, directed by Ethan Heard [who we spoke to this week], which “just blew me away” as “by far the most innovative and impactful.”
Ryan Mardesich remembers John Doyle’s revival as “equally thrilling and devastating,” adding a touching detail: “I saw him in the lobby afterward and thanked him. He responded with ‘no, thank you.’ Years later, I met George Takei, who had nothing but wonderful things to say about that process and production.”
Adam from Phoenix spent decades waiting to see a production. “When I was in college in the ‘90s I tried to get to know all of Sondheim’s shows, but Pacific Overtures was the least accessible.” Last December, he and his wife traveled to LA for the East West Players production. “It had always been so hard to find a production that it took decades for me to knock it off my bucket list. Jon Jon Briones was just mesmerizing.”
For Lawrence-Michael C. Arias in San Jose, Pacific Overtures marked several firsts. Cast as the British Admiral and Merchant in a regional production in 2001, it was his first AEA contract—and the production through which he met his husband.
The company opened on September 1, 2001. Ten days later, on 9/11, they faced the question of whether to perform at all. Many actors were reluctant. Arias recalls their director making an impassioned plea: that they were artists, that creating art mattered, and that not performing would mean surrendering something essential. That night, he writes, the company went on—and gave the strongest performance of the run.
It’s hard to match the magic of East West Players’ closing night on December 8, 2024—a performance Hoffman and his UCLA theater student friends witnessed. The legendary Gedde Watanabe, an original 1976 cast member who had played the Boy in “Someone In A Tree,” returned to play the Old Man in the same number. “Everyone was waiting in perpetual anticipation for that number, and when he entered for it, everyone began to applaud,” Hoffman recounts. Then came an unforgettable accident.
“As Watanabe sang the lyric ‘I was hidden all the time,’ he stepped up onto a platform to attempt to climb, when suddenly, the wooden veneer on the side of the platform loudly cracked from under him, and split into pieces. Watanabe looked up in surprise, and delivered the most well-timed lyric in Sondheim history: ‘It was easier to climb...’” The room erupted. Briones and Watanabe “could hardly hold it together, and they shared a look of love, pride, and recognition of the history of the moment.” That cracked platform remained visible for the rest of the show, Hoffman notes, “deeply accentuating the story and message. What a privilege it was to witness what took place on that historic night. ‘Not the building, but the beam...’”
Why Pacific Overtures Endures
Pacific Overtures continues to resonate across the decades. Chris Butler, who saw the Promenade revival, points to its unflinching examination of cultural imposition: “The arrogance of the U.S. towards other countries always rears its ugly head.” August, another U.S.-based correspondent, notes the tragic arc from “The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea”—depicting “isolated Japan, stuck to routine and questionable policy, but overall functioning as a society”—to “Next,” with its “sharp orchestration and vocal layering ... bragging of artifice and commercialization, a world completely broken into and shifted, for better and for worse.”
Maximilian Beger in Germany, one of the few in his country to know the show intimately (there has never been a German production), finds its power in the Reciter’s final line: “Welcome to Japan.” It’s “a very neutral” conclusion to everything we’ve experienced, he writes. “Nippon is gone. Times and people have changed for the better and for worse. There is no turning back. We can only go forward.”
Reid Orphan in Canada draws a direct line from 1853 to the present: “We’ve changed so little since the 1850s. We like to think we’re no longer colonialist, but we still very much are, enforcing our Western notions of democracy, rights (both human and animal), and much more on the wider world without giving a second thought to the implications.” Orphan recounts speaking with George Takei about how “the show really highlights how America’s forcing open of Japan is the ultimate reason for Pearl Harbor’s attack, the Rape of Nanjing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed.” The show, Orphan argues, “forces us to ask the question that makes us most uncomfortable: are we at fault?”
Marcus Ho sees the show’s 1976 creation as “a very interesting moment in American history when Japan was poised to take over the world, and there was legitimate anxiety around whether that would come true. Even if attitudes towards Japan have changed, many of the same anxieties are reflected in how our media discusses China, for instance, or South Korea. The exact ‘Other’ changes throughout the years, but I doubt the American attitude towards Asia as a whole has drifted that far from how it was in 1976.”
Reid Orphan also connects the song “There Is No Other Way” to personal experience: “As someone who has struggled in the past with mental health and black and white thinking, the song resonates so much. Seeing some external force and thinking that there is only one way to deal with it. In reality, there is only one way: deal with it yourself. However, Tamate’s solution feels so much easier than Kayama’s.”
Patrick Quion finds contemporary meaning in a specific image: “I’m the part that’s underneath / with my sword inside my sheath.’ The imagery packed in that perfect rhyme, of a hidden witness ready to wield their also-hidden power, is something that has stuck with me. I think of it often as we collectively witness history unfold in this country.”
The show’s themes prove genuinely timeless. Karen U. reflects: “Although it tells a very specific story in a very stylized way, Pacific Overtures is a show that grapples with change, and national and personal identity, and those themes resonate as much now as then.” Alexander agrees: “A lot of the themes—the way culture shifts, how much do we hold onto the past versus how forward do we move, the nature of our history and culture and how THAT shapes our future—are very universal themes.”
For Beger, the show captures something fundamental about human experience: “It’s about a society that’s forced to change. Times are changing and things occur you would have never thought about. And you just have to keep moving on in this always-changing world. It doesn’t mean that the change is for the better. But you have no choice. You have to keep going somehow. That’s an experience that everybody shares.”
Stephen Gonya, reflecting on his multiple viewings in 1976, identifies what has always distinguished the show: “Sondheim once again stretched his musical talents and wrote in a style that was new to him, yet he made everything sound authentic and original, not imitative.”
Ryan Mardesich captures the show’s essential quality: “It’s political without preaching. We’re simply seeing the effect that the West is having on this community.” Ross DeHovitz, who saw Mako with the original company in San Francisco, adds simply: “It’s a great musical.”
From the Winter Garden to Little Tokyo, from Yale to Madrid, from those first previews to that cracked platform in 2024, Pacific Overtures continues to astonish, challenge, and move audiences. Kim Max liked the lyric “Add the sugar, spread the plaster!” so much it became part of her email address. And that line might serve as the perfect metaphor for the show itself: superficial sweetness concealing bitter truth, artful presentation revealing uncomfortable reality. Fifty years on, as Barry Schilmeister observes, it remains “an elegant reminder that power and arrogance corrupt; that loss of self-respect means loss of identity. That more is not, in itself, better. These truths have no age.”
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I saw the original three times, once in previews and twice more during its run. Isao Sato was a marvelous Kayama. I’ve seen it three more times since then: with the Pegasus Players in Chicago, in the Roundabout revival (Alvin Ing, the Shogun’s Mother in 1976, was the Old Man in “Someone in a Tree”), and at CSC with George Takei as the Reciter. “I was there then; I am here still.”
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