On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (20 page)

MADAME ARMFELDT
: And now—who knows? He might have been the love of my life.

Lansbury delivered the words as though they were a very renunciation of all that she had lived for, even a requiem for the end of all love. In rejecting the ring because it lacked splendor, she had failed in the thing that matters most: style. It’s the middle-class pieties that are the true vanities—the belief that an expensive ring betokens a wealth of love. No: the man free of conformist piety creates life and love. Others’ acts are clichés; his acts are unique.

Nunn’s
Night Music
was filled with such revisionist readings. Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Désirée gave an elaborated spoof of diva dos and don’ts on her play-within-a-play entrance, and her Egerman, Alexander Hanson, threw away many lines that other lawyers emphasize. Hanson, who had originated the role for Nunn in London, had played Henrik years before, at Chichester in 1989—the best Sondheim had seen to that point, he told me, though he did think young Hanson’s toned physique, unshirted for a spell in Act Two, suggested a heavy program at the Malmö Crunch outlet. Now in his seniority, Hanson’s individualized delivery repositioned the lawyer as the show’s protagonist, thus realigning the part with its use in the film, wherein Bergman clearly sees him and not Désirée as the actuating force.

Incidentally, near the end of
Night Music
’s Boston tryout, Jean Anouilh’s agent contacted Hal Prince with the exciting news that the rights to
Ring Round the Moon
were now available for negotiation. In reply, Prince simply said he was no longer interested.

Ha!

^*
Ingmar Bergman, who loved the show, told Sondheim, “She really does tend to fuck the audience, doesn’t she?” Sondheim, delighted at this touch of High Art talking Low Show Biz, couldn’t wait to call up Mary Rodgers and share the tale.

^*
Madame Armfeldt cues the number in with “[Your guests] will not be served my best champagne. I am saving that for my funeral.” Then she disappears—but, with the movie camera giving him extra narrative mobility, Sondheim wrote some lyrics for her for the film, in which Hermione Gingold repeated her stage role. As she gleefully anticipates hiding from the guests for most of the weekend, she looks exactly like ventriloquist Wayland Flowers’ puppet Madame.

^*
The only other
Night Music
number in
is Henrik’s “Later,” which sounds vastly different from “Liaisons” and “Silly People” and, in yet more distancing from them, is suffused with Henrik’s ‘cello playing.

Pacific Overtures

Kabuki Broadway on events in Japanese history, 1976.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: John Weidman (with “additional material” by Hugh Wheeler).

Original Leads: Mako, Soon-Teck Oh, Yuki Shimoda, Sab Shimono, Isao Sato. Director: Hal Prince.

Richard Storry, in
A History of Modern Japan
, explains three intentions behind Admiral Matthew Calbraith Perry’s delivery of a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the Japanese authorities, requesting the opening of relations between their two countries. One purpose was simple trade, another the need to secure decent treatment for American seamen who, through shipwreck or other hazards, became stranded in Japan. And the third purpose was the need for steamships to pick up supplies (especially coal) in mid-journey when crossing the Pacific from California to Canton, for the United States was doing business with China.

This was gunboat diplomacy; Japan had no choice but to assent. And so it joined perforce the global community. But what
is
Japan? Storry, reflecting upon such anomalies as “
hara-kiri
” and “the tea ceremony” and upon “Kamikaze planes” and “the delicacy of Japanese paintings,” concludes, “There may be stranger nations than Japan. But none … has been so praised and so reviled, so much discussed and so little understood.”

Pacific Overtures
is an attempt to understand the Japanese, using their own form, Kabuki theatre, as a jumping-off place. In a way, Kabuki was a concept musical before there even were musicals; it shares some of the presentational elements of the genre.
Pacific Overtures
makes much of the most formalistic qualities of Kabuki—the
hanamichi
(“flowery path”) that runs from the back of the house to the stage; the all-male cast; the reciter, who narrates and plays certain roles; the flamboyant poses and gestures and broad accents on key words; the stagehands who bustle about, technically “unseen.” Sondheim has described
Pacific Overtures
as what happens when “a Japanese playwright exposed to American musical theatre” writes one. But one what? Is this an American show with Kabuki flavoring or a work in Kabuki style with facets of the musical tucked in?

It’s both, because the treatment varies. And a peculiar development governs the show’s tone: as the action progresses and Japan becomes more and more Westernized, the score grows less and less “Asian” and more and more “Broadway” in music and lyrics.

Thus, the second number, “There Is No Other Way,” is composed very sparely, as the rough soprano of a recorder outlines the melody, two vocalists repeat it, the violins echo it, and the harp adds a melody of its own. One of Sondheim’s most beautiful creations, it is made of just a few strands of music sorrowfully teasing each other, quite without the rich harmony the composer utilizes elsewhere. The farewell of a husband and wife in perilous times, it is all the more notable for its lean, deceptively self-effacing presentation, a classic instance of Less is more. “Should I fail,” the husband tells his wife, “you know what we must do.” And, as he leaves, the wife takes out the sword with which she will commit ritual suicide.

“A scene of absorbing interest!” Thus John Weidman’s version of the Kabuki Reciter might put it, in typical Japanese understatement. Yet the emotions are not dramatized in the American style, whereby the pair would sing directly to each other, in the manner of, say,
West Side Story
’s Tony and Maria. Instead, the husband is silent, the wife dances to express what she is feeling, and two Observers handle the singing, one describing the event in haiku and the other interpreting what the wife is “saying.”

It is an exotic and stylized number, truly imported to Broadway from another form of drama. Yet, partway through the first act, a comic number for a bordello madam and her geishas, “Welcome To Kanagawa,” has the tiniest tang of Cole Porter or Alan Jay Lerner in its lyrics about the erotic life. Thus Broadway invades the show’s tone as American foreign policy will invade Japan. By the end of the act, the traditional Kabuki Lion Dance—the lion here being how the Japanese view Commodore Perry, in a flowing version of a Navy officer’s blue-and-gold tunic over red-striped white trousers but with a lion’s mane of white bristles down to the knees—is performed to a combination of John Philip Sousa and drums along the Mohawk.

Then, after the intermission, comes “Please Hello,” made entirely of the pastiche style that the American musical can’t get enough of. Finally, by
Pacific Overtures
’ last number, “Next,” the transformation of Japan is complete: the women of the company are now part of the performing troupe instead of stagehands in black, and the song itself casts away all traces of Asian music.

In subject matter and approach, this show is an epic, so, to humanize it, the authors give us two individuals, good friends whose story unfolds in precise relation to how Japan is changing. One of the two Westernizes himself. The other becomes immersed in tradition and xenophobic hatred, till these two comrades end as bitter enemies.

Considering all this in terms of the ancient Greek stage, the various duties of the Chorus are embodied in the Reciter, who serves as emcee, guide, and commentator. The protagonist—there can only be one, speaking purely—is Kayama (the husband of “There Is No Other Way”), who helps Japan in dealing with the Americans. The Greek so-called Second Actor is Manjiro, who assists Kayama, but later grows conservative and unyielding. Again, referring back to Richard Storry: which one represents the real Japan, so contradictory in its culture and policies? The realist or the idealist? The political man or the cultural man? And what is the Reciter’s opinion? Here we have the Chorus, the First Actor, and the Second Actor—a complete drama, at least at the time of Aeschylus. Around them, a host of minor characters—who of course could not be included in the old Greek plays, limited to the Chorus and (after Aeschylus) at most four speaking characters at a time—fill out the historical scenario. There are samurai warriors, lords and their households, common people, Perry’s American crew, and three British sailors who accost a shy Japanese maid and enrage her father, who cuts them down, creating an international incident.

Colorful events require colorful representation, and
Pacific Overtures
’ original production, in the Bicentennial year, was one of the musical’s outstanding spectacles. It happens that the set designer, Boris Aronson (in his fourth Sondheim-Prince assignment), was already an enthusiast of Japanese art, and he planned
Pacific Overtures
’ scenery to duplicate its strangely weightless quality, even in an optics-rich design plot that seemed at times to fill the stage with imposing constructions.

Consider for example the “Four Black Dragons” sequence (immediately dubbed “Four Black Drag Queens” by Broadway wags). The American warships have arrived off the coast, and the Japanese, though gravely reluctant, must take some action in response. Aronson saw this as an opportunity to “paint” the playing area with a depiction of this clash of civilizations that would read as stylized, realistic, and symbolic all at once. As Frank Rich and Aronson’s widow, Lisa, recount it in
The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson
, the designer took over the costume department from Florence Klotz to dress each of four choristers as a machine, to move in automated fashion. These four, all women, were attired in nineteenth-century business suits topped by derbies and smoking cigars, but their machine outfits combined clockwork wheels and a smokestack. Thus, they were steamships, but also icons of industrial-age capitalism, as well as menacing contraptions of mysterious power. In effect, they represented, respectively, American ingenuity, the relentless force of history, and Japanese helplessness. Surging onto the scene along the
hanamichi
, these four “machines” baffled the public at the Boston tryout. The costuming was Aronson at his most imaginative, but it may have made too arcane a leap for the audience to follow, and the machines had to be dropped.

Aronson’s second idea for the same scene was far more successful. Setting aside the “four black dragons,” Aronson created just Commodore Perry’s flagship, the USS
Powhatan
, deliberately built to seem grotesquely ponderous in contrast to the delicacy of the Japanese structures. In an effect that often provoked cheers in the house, the boat came forward in two huge pieces from the rear of the stage in semi-darkness, accompanied by Sondheim’s “Four Black Dragons” leitmotif, eerie string harmonics sustained over an ominous six-note theme in the brass, with pounding drums and squealing woodwinds. Arriving downstage, the two halves of the ship spread out and joined together as the lights came up enough for the audience to discern the grandiose
Powhatan
, with its sailors and officers and, dominating all, Commodore Perry, stylized as the Kabuki lion. Arrestingly, the
Powhatan
’s prow suggested a monster’s face, its wide, fire-orange eyes glowing with elated menace. It seemed all the more devastating in that the Japanese emissary sent to meet the Americans was ensconced in a dinky little craft maneuvered by a stagehand—that is, pre-industrially. The visual message thus compared the energy the Americans had harnessed with the primitive locomotion of the Japanese.

Sondheim’s musicals are unique generally, but
Pacific Overtures
stands out in the Sondheim-Prince canon for its blending of such contrary styles as Broadway and Kabuki, and its score, too, is one of a kind. Nowhere is Sondheim’s “playwrighting” music more overt than in the First Number, “The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea,” in which the Reciter and the ensemble establish the work’s perspective, its long view of things. The number is roughly comparable to countless First Numbers before it, from
Naughty Marietta
(1910) to
Li’l Abner
(1956), but they evoke only a location—colonial New Orleans; a squonky hillbilly village—while “Advantages” actually analyzes a society. Japan, the company explains, exists as a stagnant culture where time stands still and history is banned. Nothing happens there—no
St. Matthew Passion
, no Enlightenment, no
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. And nothing is going to happen, they tell us, to a belligerent vamp in the most unusual chord of
. As the song proceeds, the cast counts off the interlocking systems of self-control: in “the arrangement of the screens” (art), “the arrangement of the rice” (economics), and “the arrangement of the bows” (the sociopolitical structure). At the end, as the Japanese slowly quit the stage, looking out at us as if daring us to disapprove in our typical Western impatience, the Reciter remains impassive in his position downstage center. We hear a tone cluster on strings and celesta, almost asking a question. And the Reciter answers it: “We float!” End of story, it seems. But the concluding tonic chord contains a stray pitch on the fourth of the scale, creating an air of doubt. History is about to happen to Japan.