Pacific Overtures: Review - Union Theatre, 2014

Ian Mowat (left) as the Madame of Kanagawa and Joel Baylis as one of her new recruits in Michael Strassen's Pacific Overtures, Union Theatre, 2014. Photo: Darren Bell.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Pacific Overtures, we look back through the archive for features and reviews. Here, Society regular - and contributor to Musical Theatre Review - Jeremy Chapman shares his thoughts on the 2014 all-male revival of the show at the Union Theatre in London, directed by Michael Strassen.

Review of Pacific Overtures at Union Theatre in 2014. Author: Jeremy Chapman

The almost-operatic Pacific Overtures was never going to be easy listening and it’s certainly not everybody’s cup of sake but the 45-seater Union Theatre appears to have itself an unexpected hit with this classy Michael Strassen revival of one of Stephen Sondheim’s most complex and ambitious works.

All but a handful of performances for the four-week run of this 1976 middle-era Sondheim are already sold out and at least one fan has booked himself five tickets.

Yet even some Sondheim diehards will admit, if pressed, that it is hard work at times, that there are occasional dramatic dips, and Strassen, much acclaimed for previous Sondheim musicals Assassins and Company at the Union, says in his programme note: “Some say this is a difficult piece – I hopefully offer you the chance to see its simple beating heart.”

Pacific Overtures started out as a John Weidman play and concerned itself with Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853, bearing a letter from the American president that would open up trade links with “those backward-seeming, semi-barbarous people” and bring their slow-paced, rice-growing, screen painting, fear-of-change, suspicion-of-foreigners lifestyle into line with so-called Western civilisation.

Perry records in his diary that he hopes the Japanese will accept his “pacific overtures” and Sondheim, ever a pun lover, eagerly adopts the double meaning of pacific – peace and the ocean.

Hal Prince used Weidman’s book and Sondheim’s music and lyrics to make a serious, political musical which ran on Broadway for six months. The current enthusiasm stems from the fact that it is so rarely seen in the UK these days and, of course, anything with Strassen’s name on it is likely to be well worth seeing.

The original cast was almost entirely Asian with the show being based on Japanese Kabuki theatre which combines dancing and music, with all female parts impersonated by men.

It therefore takes a while getting the head around an all-European cast at the Union, but performances and make-up are so authentic and the precisely styled movements so of their time and place that we soon get used to it.

The all-male cast of Michael Strassen's Pacific Overtures, Union Theatre, 2014. Photo: Darren Bell.

The most famous Kabuki dance, the Lion, where the performer swings around his enormous mane while whirling across the stage, is given to Commodore Perry at the end of the long Act I and is performed with quite magificent panache by Marios Nicolaides.

Before then we hear the song Sondheim rates the best he ever wrote, "Someone in a Tree", a witty satire which says how different history looks depending where you are sitting, while taking a poke at how America has always tried to impose its own values on other civilisations.

The all-male cast of Michael Strassen's Pacific Overtures, stripped bare of all but the essentials - in this case, Sybil Jean Gray's simple but effective muslin costumes.

More obviously funny is "Welcome to Kanegawa" which the Madam and her geishas perform with relish for their sailor visitors, while "Chrysanthemum Tea" is a comic comment on the ineffectiveness of the Shogun, stuck as he is in a time-warp, and the nobs in general who cannot act themselves and have to send a lowly samurai and his fisherman friend to shoo away the Commodore’s men. It ends in tears, of course, and multiple killings, as all change does.

Act II is more Westernised as Japan modernises to become a world trade power, with the telling words of the "Next" finale – “Who’s the stronger, who’s the faster?/Let the pupil show the master” – having us ponder the spiritual cost of the making of Japan’s economic miracle. The script is brought bang up to date with name-checks of Toyota and Tokyo’s staging of the 2020 Olympics.

Strassen has assembled, tutored and multi-tasked a talented cast of 13 into his Pacific vision, some of whom have five and six parts to play. It is obviously an ensemble piece, more about ideas than characters, but experienced Ian Mowat, Alexander McMorran and the wonderfully camp Marc Lee Joseph merit special applause, Mowat both as the Madam and a highly amusing British admiral singing a Gilbert & Sullivan-type ditty in "Please Hello".

The Sondheim Society acquired a number of original costume sketches by Sybil Jean Gray for the 2014 Union Production. Here, we see Abe engaging with the American Admiral. Signed by artist and performers Joel Harper-Jackson (Admiral) and Alexander McMorran (Abe).

Oli Reynolds, a recent graduate from the Guildford School of Acting (where Strassen himself cut his teeth before winning a part in the original cast of Miss Saigon), is excellent as the samurai Kayama, killed by his one-time friend, the fisherman Manjiro (Emanuel Alba). Others in a consistently fine team are Ken Christensen as The Reciter, Joe Harper-Jackson and Lee Van Geelen (men of many parts, six apiece!), Anthony Selwyn (on his professional debut), Matt Jolly, Joel Baylis and dance captain Josh Andrews.

The music is quite beautifully and hauntingly performed by MD Richard Bates (piano) and his team of Janette Williams (percussion), Elaine Booth (reeds) and Sally Russell (cello) behind the drapes of a simple set.

Tim Deiling’s subtle lighting and Sybil Jean Gray’s oriental costumes and masks create the mood superbly in an evening that grows in the telling and ends with an enthusiastic audience very much on-side.

This review first appeared in Musical Theatre Review and in an extended form in Sondheim: The Magazine, September 2014, pp.22-25