Playwright: Stephen Sondheim ( music and lyrics ) ,John Weidman ( book ) , additional material by Hugh Wheeler . At: Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago at Theatre Building Chicago,1225 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-327-5252; $37 Runs through: April 23
Toward the end of the first act of Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, an unexpected death dominates a scene that should be one of the musical's emotional lynchpins. But in Porchlight's production of the intricate musical, it contains only a wisp of truth. Instead of immersing the audience in anguish, the scene highlights the fundamental shortcoming of director L. Walter Stearn's ambitious staging.
Up until the death, Stearns has the cast playing it broad. A Japanese lord grimaces like Popeye when told there are foreign ships in Japanese waters. Two men scamper across the stage in a comic cardboard boat modeled after Fred Flintstone's foot-powered car. An elderly woman engages in a bit of tottering slapstick when she proclaims must be carried as her family flees the intruders. From all-powerful Shogun to lowly fisherman, emotions are depicted by mask-like mugging ( or actual masks, when Commodore Matthew Perry and other Western characters take the stage. ) As the death scene commences with a keening Samurai, it feels like just another instance of exaggerated emoting.
Similar problems plague the whole production as Stearns unsuccessfully veers from the ridiculous to the sublime in depicting Japan's forced transition from isolated, floating kingdom to international trade hub. Using a pentatonic Asian scale, Sondheim etches the seismic changes that reshaped Japan after 1853, when Perry employed gun-barrel diplomacy in order to force the country to trade with the West. The story is rich, intricate and lovely, provocative history painted with complex and delicate strokes by Sondheim ( music and lyrics ) and John Weidman ( book ) with additional material by Hugh Wheeler. For Japan, the overpowering, abrupt influx of Western mores into a culture untouched by outsiders for centuries is both tragic and empowering.
Or it should be, anyway.
A series of aggressively unnatural-looking wigs also diminishes the possibility of the audience becoming fully immersed in Pacific Overtures. Yes, we understand that realistic hairpieces can be prohibitively expensive. But that doesn't change the fact that the aesthetics of helmet-hair sculptures distract mightily from the story at hand. It's difficult to take a climactic sword fight seriously when the Samurai involved are upstaged by glaringly fake follicles. Kimonos that evoke the linen closet of bargain hotel chain don't help the problematic visuals either.
It's not until the final musical number, "Next," that Pacific Overtures fully resonates. Wig-free and in contemporary black dance clothes, the cast delivers a thrilling, kinetic epilogue about the influences of modern-day Japan on the West and vice versa. If Stearns could instill the rest of the production with the spirit of that final scene, he'd have a winner here. As it is, Pacific Overtures remains unaffecting.