PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Pacific Overtures: An Asian Occasion
By Harry Haun
03 Dec 2004
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From Top: Tom Jones; Stephen Sondheim; John Weidman; B.D. Wong; Amon Miyamoto; Blair Brown; Shuler Hensley and Stephanie March; Michael Mayer; Denis O'Hare and Hayley Mills
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | East met West Dec. 2 as Pacific Overtures bowed at Studio 54—ponder that collision of cultural planets!—and, if it had been a fashion contest, the seasoned first-nighters in their Broadway best would have finished second to the elegant Easterners, a rather large and well turned-out contingent with an advanced sense of occasion and how to dress for it.
"Look at these beautiful Japanese people arriving—aren't they gorgeous?" marveled Tom Jones, waiting for his date at the entranceway of the disco-temple-turned-legit. "It's funny," agreed Anne Kaufman Schneider, "they wear Western clothes, and they win."
The librettist of The Fantasticks and the daughter of George S. Kaufman drank in the parade of Asian elite who stylishly outpointed the opening-night veterans attending this musical that depicts the industrialization (read: Americanization) of Japan from 1853 on.
It was a history lesson—courtesy of composer Stephen Sondheim and librettist John Weidman, revived and revised from '76—and it made its own history this time around.
B. D. Wong, the reciter and over-the-title star of the show, stepped forth at the curtain call and pointed out the "wonderful and amazing and noteworthy Broadway debut" being marked with this revival. "A Japanese citizen has never directed a Broadway musical before," he said, his voice breaking with emotion. "An incredible artist named Amon Miyamoto came from Japan . . . [and] tonight he becomes one of Broadway's own."
Miyamoto, the show's director-choreographer, stepped on stage and into a dream he'd harbored from adolescence, growing up on American showtunes, pining for Broadway.
There wasn't a dry eye in the house, least of all on stage and most of all on Miyamoto.
"My mother was a dancer so I always dreamed about Broadway," Miyamoto admitted at the post-premiere party bash at Guastavino's on the (very) East Side. "Since I was 18 years old, I've had three idols—Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett."
He only got to meet Sondheim, but it took a Tokyo production of Pacific Overtures to do it. "Steve and I were absolutely knocked out by it," Weidman remembered. "We really felt that we were having one of the most thrilling nights we ever had in the theatre. Because of Amon's background—he has worked so much with Western musicals in Tokyo and is so comfortable with his own Japanese theatrical traditions—I feel that, in a funny way, he poured more Western energy in the piece than had ever been there before.
"Also, by casting women in women's parts when it really mattered, I think he made the emotions of the story more easily available to an audience than has been true in the past.
"Hal Prince [Pacific Overtures' original director] really invented the show with us. His take on it was a fascinating one 28 years ago, but this feels like the right one for 2004."
There was some tweaking—including an Iraq crack in the last number ("Next")—to bring the show up to contemporary speed, but that's not unusual for Pacific Overtures, according to Weidman. "Once we were in previews, we did the kind of trimming that we would do of any show once it was in front of an audience. Every production of this show that we have ever done, I have written new lines for the end of the show. There've always been those five or six lines that have always been new to try and make sure they reflected where the production was. Listen, there haven't been that many major productions of this show so it's not a full-time job, but we wanted to have a maximum impact at the end."
How large the Asian invasion was did not become clear to the first-night regulars until they arrived at Guastavino's and found every table in the joint reserved for investors. The bar was an unbroken line of familiar faces eating standing up between grousings.
Wong, the Tony-winning M. Butterfly, flitted among the opening-night irregulars with the greatest ease and graciousness, posing for photos in corporate clusters, signing autographs to all who ask, maintaining a stainless steel smile even when he seems to be the center of an endless feeding frenzy. "Well, what else am I going to do?" he shrugged reasonably.
"There's no show without money from these people. There's just no show. And it's a great thing to have a show that introduces a Japanese director to Broadway. It's about Japan, and the play is a play that has not been done with quite the Japanese perspective that it has in our production. And to have money from Japanese corporations, supporting the productions—that's a wonderful community equation, and it should be encouraged."
Some of the members of the cast have a past with Pacific Overtures. Sab Shimono, the late-blooming samurai warrior, Manjiro, in the original Broadway production, now has been elevated to Lord Abe—and still finds the show, regardless of the role, "a challenge."
Francis Jue, who last sang "Mammy" in Mandarin on Broadway (in Thoroughly Modern Millie), has risen in the 20 years since the Off Broadway revival from farm girl to drag madam. "I kept thinking back tonight to 1984 when I did the revival of Pacific Overtures up at the Promenade, and my good friend Tommy Ikeda was the madam. He was just perfection, and I just really wanted to honor him. I really just wanted to do it for him. It really felt as though we all were owning the show and sort of passing it on to the next."
Unusual for opening night was a list of replacements in the program, necessitated by a couple of injuries in the company. "I'm doing about 50-60 percent of my show because I injured my knee just before previews began," Jue said. "I have some torn tendon in my knee so there are some things I can do in the show and some things that I still can't. Continued...
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