PLAYING YOUR HUNCHES.(Theater Review)

In the canon of Stephen Sondheim-Hal Prince musicals, "Pacific Overtures" (produced in 1976 and now revived by the Roundabout Theatre at Studio 54) falls between the conventional romantic elegance of "A Little Night Music" (1973) and the macabre cynicism of their masterpiece "Sweeney Todd" (1979). "Pacific Overtures," which found little favor with the public, and which lost to "A Chorus Line" as that year's best musical, was the stalking horse for the team's rebellion against the musical's hidebound rituals. "Pacific Overtures" shouldered the burden of history, not just happiness. Leapfrogging from 1853 to the present, it told the story of Commodore Perry's gunboat diplomacy with Japan, and the American attempt to force a closed, feudal "floating kingdom" to open trading negotiations with the West. "Pacific Overtures" itself might be called a piece of showboat diplomacy. Here, just because they could, Sondheim and Prince--the big guns of the art form--tried to muscle the insular American musical away from its populist roots to their esoteric way of doing business. The challenge, according to Prince, was to "tell the story as though it were written by a Japanese playwright in the Kabuki style, with the Americans the traditional Kabuki villains." In this new kind of musical, concept replaced character, gravity replaced frivolity, irony replaced affirmation. In merging the musical idioms of East and West, for instance, "Pacific Overtures" was meant to become what it dramatized: an act of cultural violation.

"One must accommodate the times / As one lives them," the samurai-turned-governor Kayama (Michael K. Lee) sings in "A Bowler Hat" as he transforms before our eyes from warrior to capitalist gent. Sondheim's musicals, over the decades, have also adjusted to a spiritual shift in society. In the first part of his career, Sondheim wrote impeccable lyrics to "West Side Story" (1957) and to "Gypsy" (1959), which gave postwar American optimism its last and most sensational expression. After Vietnam, the musical could no longer hymn with conviction its faith in the nation's goodness. "How is it you sing anything? / How is it you sing?" someone asks in "Sweeney Todd"; the question was, and remains, crucial to the future of the musical.

With "Company" (1970)--a plotless musical about blighted relationships--Sondheim emerged as both lyricist and composer; he'd struck the mother lode of disillusion, which spoke to the culture's confusions. He became Broadway's laureate of disenchantment. In the blasted joys and jubilant despairs of his subsequent shows, he sounded the new note of a winded civilization, uncertain even of its pleasure. "Pacific Overtures" is a case in point. When Commodore Perry finally appears, he is depicted from the Japanese point of view as a masked and monstrous colossus whose mad eyes beam white light at us. Instead of making a show of blessing--the musical's traditional role--"Pacific Overtures" makes a spectacle of the Republic's barbarity.

By imposing a quasi-Brechtian style--a Reciter (B. D. Wong) mediates the story and Japanese history--"Pacific Overtures" insists on detachment. At a stroke, the hot world of the musical becomes cool; nonetheless, the technical prowess of the individual creative contributions is self-evident. John Weidman's book is crisp, clear, and ambitious. Amon Miyamoto's direction is also elegant; he uses Junko Koshino's subtle costumes to make minimal but powerful stage pictures. The production's sense of visual and emotional reserve brings with it a certain aridity: one longs for a touch of American vulgarity. This seems to be true even of Sondheim, whose songs take flight when they're finally allowed to express the jazzy Western momentum. In its ingenious verbal shorthand, "Please Hello!"--a song about West meeting East--best shows off Sondheim's theatrical panache. The visiting foreign admirals wrap the Shogun's first counsellor in persiflage and flags, until he is literally a pinwheel of national promises. The French Admiral, swaggering in leather pants, is particularly piquant: "A detente, a detente / Is ze only thing we wish! / Same as zem, except additional / Ze rights to fish."

"Pacific Overtures" certainly raises the intellectual ...