This Day in Musical History (Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ Opens)

Jan. 11, 1976—After a Boston preview and a one-month run at the Kennedy Center, Pacific Overtures premiered at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. It was another success d’estime, but hardly a blockbuster, by Stephen Sondheim, closing after 193 performances.

Starting in the 1960s, twentysomething John Weidman worked on the story, about how the "black ship" of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's East India Squadron ended more than two centuries of isolation from non-Dutch Westerners imposed by Japan's shogunate.

But after toiling on this straight drama for years, producer Harold Prince told Weidman he saw wider possibilities for opening it up, particularly as a musical in collaboration with Sondheim.

Though the show’s title came from a letter sent by Commodore Perry, it appealed to Sondheim’s interest in wordplay and ambiguity. The U.S. naval leader meant the phrase to signal peaceful gestures toward diplomacy (absurd on its face, considering that Perry trained guns on the populace during “negotiations”). But for Sondheim, it also meant an opening through music (“overtures”) of two nations separated by an ocean (the Pacific).

If not quite a 21^st-century “clash of civilizations,” the encounter certainly changed both races. And it startled both the creators of the show and its American viewers in that bicentennial year—who, if they heard of Commodore Perry at all, would have associated him with the kind of triumphalism displayed by Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1967 biography, Ol’ Bruin.

(For a more modern and objective perspective on these events, you might want to turn to Peter Booth Wiley’s 1990 history, Yankees in the Land of the Gods.)

In the Seventies, each show that Sondheim and Prince, had already mounted (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs) stretched the boundaries of the American musical. But this topped it all.

The all-male cast (an issue that Sondheim and Prince eventually revisited) was the least of it. The plot would be seen entirely through non-Western eyes: two Japanese friends caught (and made the scapegoats for) the ensuring epic national transition, through the conventions of Kabuki (a form of Japanese theater).

And Sondheim had set himself the task of writing the score within quasi-Japanese style of parallel 4ths, without any leading-tone or pentatonic scale. The whole thing proved unexpectedly, devilishly difficult.

(Nearly 30 years later, at the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2004 revival at Studio 54, Prince and Sondheim would live to witness the logical conclusion of their wish that the action be viewed through foreign eyes, as the musical was directed this time by Amon Miyamoto.)

As with most of those pre-workshop days of musical theater, changes were made on the fly, with deadlines bearing down on everyone. In getting ready the Kennedy Center production, Sondheim told one actor that his big number would be replaced with “Chrysanthemum Tea,” a song with four verses that needed to be memorized in three days!

In addition, “Welcome to Kanagawa,” Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), was “the most annoyingly problematic song I’ve ever written. With each revival of Pacific Overtures I rewrite it and with each revival it fails to be funny.”

The wonder is that everything turned out as well as it did. Sondheim himself claimed to the end of his life that “Someone in a Tree” was the favorite of all his songs: “I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyrics, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form.”

For more than 40 years, this was the Sondheim musical with which I was least familiar. I never heard the whole thing with lyrics, and had to make do with an orchestral suite arranging its seven “dances” or songs through a 1985 Book-of-the-Month Club collection of his work.

Then this week, in preparing this post, I came across this YouTube clip of the 1976 production, which ended up being shown then on Japanese television.

The Kennedy Center staged Pacific Overtures again as part of its 2001-2002 Sondheim Festival. But I think that producing it at this time would be the last thing that current management would consider.

A show about—let’s face it—imperialism, would not sit well with a chauvinistic, saber-rattling administration that effectively dictates policy and governance to a cultural institution once largely insulated from it.

Quote of the Day (Stephen Sondheim, on Music, ‘A Foreign Language’)

“Music is a foreign language which everyone knows but only musicians can speak.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American songwriter Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1981-2011 (2011)

Theater Review: Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

When I heard that Merrily We Roll Along, Stephen Sondheim’s flop-turned-cult favorite, was being trimmed for a production by the Roundabout Theatre Co., I feared for the worst. 

Hadn’t the musical been through enough already, with all its various versions—not just the 1981 Broadway originals, but revivals in LaJolla Playhouse, New York’s York Theater, and in Leicester, England that saw overhauls of the songs and "book"?

I needn’t have worried, though. Sure, there is no longer an overture in the show, nor “The Hills of Tomorrow,” the high-school graduation song that bookended the original production. 

But still intact are the other tunes that Sondheim aficionados like me embraced: “Not a Day Goes By,” “Old Friends,” “Good Thing Going,” “Our Time”—among the finest lyrics and melodies created by the most influential American musical theater figure of the last half century. And other tunes have been added that clarify the motives among the principals, such as “Growing Up” and “He’s Only a Boy.” 

Collaborating with the composer-lyricist himself, the Roundabout’s company-in-residence, The Fiasco Theater, has not so much downsized the material as reimagined it for this production (which closes, after a slightly extended run, this weekend, at the Roundabout’s small-scale Laura Pels Theatre). In addition to changes made in the La Jolla and London productions, it has mined earlier drafts among Sondheim’s archives, even the original 1934 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play.

With this troupe, the accent is on minimalism—six actors (with three assuming multiple roles), especially rapid costume changes, and just enough props to suggest changes in geography. (The set by Derek McLane tips its hat to the original production—there’s a sign for the Alvin Theater, where the 1981 show premiered and died.) It’s a tribute to their imagination and verve that they succeed so well this time.

The result is a more cohesive, tighter—even intermission-less—show. For all its warnings about the trappings of success, it’s easier to see than ever—even without conventionally sympathetic leads, even going back in time (like Harold Pinter’s Betrayal) to find out how the trio at the heart of this “got off the track” from each other—that this is a show about friendship, filled with a quality that Sondheim detractors have wrongly accused him of lacking: heart. 

The reversion-in-time device—admittedly dangerous because it risks losing audience sympathy for the characters at the start—pays off, as it did not at the time of the premiere, because Sondheim reprises the same songs under different circumstances, with the lyrics remaining the same but their meaning changing.

Following its well-received version of a later Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, a few years ago, The Fiasco group chose, in Merrily, far riskier fare. But clearly, it saw this work not merely as a labor of love but a common bond with the evolution of its own artistic mission: Like the two men and one woman at the heart of Merrily, the co-artistic directors of Fiasco—Noah Brody, Ben Steinfeld, and Jessie Austrian—have had to balance creative daring with the compromises needed to assure the company’s survival.

To be sure, even this time, not all the critics thought that the production’s creators had a “Good Thing Going,” either. But, though the “book” by George Furth has long been identified as the problem with this musical, after the several attempts at a rewrite, it’s only right to say that those difficulties have been exaggerated. Jokes from the original show that fell flat (e.g., about aging film actresses returning to Broadway to revive their careers, thought way back when as a dig at Elizabeth Taylor) have been excised, and the leads are middle-aged actors going back to their early 20s rather than kids asked to age into their mid-40s.

In this revamped version, Mary Flynn, the female friend with a single novel to her credit, comes in for the most noticeable character reshaping. (Literally so: midway through the proceedings, Jessie Austrian spits out olives and stage liquor while shedding Mary's frowzy costumes, revealing the svelte young woman there before booze and bitterness got the best of her.)

As Franklin Shepard, the talented composer who loses his way, Ben Steinfeld can’t get much beyond the bland compromiser who sacrifices marriage and friendship on the altar of his lust and ambition. But he’s helped by a change in the late stages of the script that makes Frank’s conduct more understandable.

Of the main trio of actors, Manu Narayan needs the least help from script changes in making his character sympathetic. Narayan, who appeared in the Lincoln Center production of My Fair Lady last fall, makes the most of his solo number here, “Franklin Shepard Inc.”—an on-air nervous breakdown in which his Charlie Kringas vents frustration with old buddy Frank for his obsession with business and his increasingly dilatory work habits.

The other, subordinate acting trio also acquits itself well. As Frank’s wronged first wife Beth, Brittany Bradford turns “Not a Day Goes By,” often interpreted as a torch song, into a cry of hurt and fury. Emily Young invests considerable intelligence into her glamorous man-trap Gussie Carmichael. And Paul C. Coffey brings varying measures of Broadway bonhomie and desperation to the role of producer Joe Joseph (a role, incidentally, played in the 1981 show by a very young, pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander).

The plot of Merrily, involving family connections among the makers of a musical (both of Frank’s wives are involved, at one stage or another, in his shows), is mirrored by the creators of this production. Jessie Austrian, for instance, is married to director Noah Brody, and music director Alexander Gemignani has created the new musical arrangements for the small band, as his father Paul was with a large orchestra for the original show.

The real-life creation of Merrily We Roll Along was filled with abundant passion and pain (all chronicled in the 2016 documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, which I reviewed here.) But the multiple attempts to revive it derive from the even more considerable passion and pain in the music and lyrics themselves. 

Have the Roundabout and Fiasco created a Merrily that won’t change anymore? Probably not. But what does it matter in an age when even shows with what are considered the most solid “books,” such as Oklahoma and My Fair Lady, end up reinterpreted quite differently? More important, a new set of theatergoers will get to hear Sondheim songs that are uncommonly witty, wise and warm.

Quote of the Day (Stephen Sondheim, on Why Lyrics Need Music)

“Music straitjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.”—American musical composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (2010)

Flashback, April 2013: Broadway Legend Stritch Bids Fans Farewell at Cafe Carlyle

Bold and brassy Elaine Stritch, who became a theater legend with performances in musicals by Rodgers and Hart, Noel Coward, and Stephen Sondheim—then made audiences laugh with an acclaimed one-woman in which she interspersed songs with reminiscences of these and other show-business luminaries—said goodbye to the cabaret world she had once conquered with a sold-out, five-night gig at the Cafe Carlyle in early April 2013.

I wrote a tribute to Stritch following her death in July 2014, but this particular engagement seemed too poignant not to discuss in more detail. It brings to the fore a question most fans wish they never have to confront: Should favorite entertainers take their last bows at a point when their skills have already visibly deteriorated? In other words, what kind of memories do they want to leave their audiences?

Celebrities—including Tom Hanks, Tony Bennett, Liza Minnelli, Martin Short, Michael Feinstein, Mandy Patinkin, and Bernadette Peters—came out in force in April 2013 to pay tribute to the 88-year-old actress, who had already announced that, due to a variety of ills—diabetes, eye troubles, falls leading to a hip replacement, and small strokes—she would not only cease performing but return to her native Michigan, to be near her nephews and nieces. 

Most accounts of the engagement followed the line laid out in a review by influential New York Times critic Stephen Holden: pay tribute to her irrepressible spirit, but inform those about to attend what they could expect: “For the truly faithful, just being in Ms. Stritch’s presence was enough, but a cabaret performance it was not, and the show’s dearth of music did seem to leave some unsatisfied.”

In one sense, Holden was perfectly correct: Stritch’s friends were more than willing to overlook the inevitable frustration and shortness of memory that their beloved “Stritchy” exhibited.

In truth, she probably had the group in the palm of her hand with her first lines: “Isn’t this fantastic, what a star I am? I mention I’m going home, and I’m a star immediately! This used to happen with my boyfriends—as soon I’d say ‘I gotta go home now’ they fell in love.”

Stritch first made her name in the 1952 revival of Pal Joey, in which she gave indelible life to the number by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart about an insouciant stripper. Several years later, she impressed Noel Coward in her appearance in Sail Away.

But she became a talent impossible to ignore in Sondheim’s Company. That landmark 1970 musical provided numerous solo opportunities for its cast members to shine, but arguably none made a bigger impression than Stritch, who helped make the title of her big number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” an instantly recognizable catchphrase for women of a certain age seeking to match their marital disappointment with “another vodka stinger.” 

The force of Stritch’s incendiary performance in that tale of urban couples fumbling through the Age of Aquarius might have been ephemeral but for the original-cast album. A long-shelved TV documentary by D.A. Pennebaker about those painstaking recording sessions detailed the actress’s continued ineffectual attempts to recapture for vinyl the magic she had had little problem summoning nightly—as well as her eventual triumph, after being sent home to rest. 

From the various accounts of those last Carlyle shows, it seems clear that the small, intimate band of listeners on those early spring nights knew better than to expect songs delivered in a strong voice from a steel-trap memory. (Even the frequent prompting of her faithful accompanist, Rob Bowman, wasn’t always enough to get her through.)  

“This is the kind of show where we don’t know what is going to happen,” the actress said. That sense was confirmed later in the evening when Stritch admitted that she was so scared before the show that she had had half a drink, then again when she couldn’t always control the reactions of the room. 

Nevertheless, they had come, from what many may have guessed might be the last time, to say thank you to a salty force of nature who had given them stories and memories they would dine out on for the rest of their lives. 

Given Stritch’s reputation as a stage performer, I was surprised to see from her listing on the Internet Broadway database that there was a 20-year hiatus between Company and her next appearance on the Great White Way, in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. 

Although some of that time was in London, during her marriage to John Bay, she made the most of one short appearance: the 1985 concert revival of Sondheim’s Follies, where she delivered—what else?—a close-to-definitive rendition of “Broadway Baby.” (Sondheim would continue to play a major role in her midlife-to-late life reinvention, as she appeared for the last time on Broadway in his A Little Night Music and made his “I’m Still Here” an integral part of her one-woman show.) It was easily enough to get her inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1995.

I hope that some writer even now is at work on her biography, interviewing those who knew her while some are still alive and their memories are fresh. In the not-so-distant future, I wouldn’t be surprised if some short-sighted millennial editor at a publishing house dismissed her as being only of local interest. Stritch lived a vivid, exuberant, but complicated life, and it would be a shame if her bright flame were extinguished amid a fickle posterity.

(For a vividly impressionistic account of Stritch’s next-to-last performance, see Sarah Larson’s piece in The New Yorker.)

The accompanying photo of Elaine Stritch was taken at the Creative Arts Emmys on Sept. 12, 2009, by Greg Hernandez (Greg in Hollywood).

Film Review: ‘Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened’

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am an aficionado of Stephen Sondheim. The first original-cast album of his that I ever bought—and took to heart—was not one of his Broadway successes (e.g., A Little Night Music), but instead Merrily We Roll Along. In prior posts, I considered this 1981 musical’s disastrous initial Broadway run (so bad that the lyricist-composer did not work again with longtime producer-director Harold Prince for another 20 years), and reviewed a wonderful revival of this work, four years ago, by the New York musical series Encores.

Even for those like me who are at least somewhat familiar with this decidedly mixed history, however, the 96-minute documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened yielded many surprising insights. I missed a performance at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village a few weeks ago that featured several members—or, I should say, survivors—of the 1981 run. But I was fortunate enough to catch up on it at an afternoon showing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center last week.

One of those survivors was Lonny Price, one of the three original leads, narrates and directs this retrospective in a spirit that, like an earlier Sondheim song, might be termed “sorry-grateful.” Several years into making the film, he learned that footage long since believed lost—tapes for a “making-of” TV documentary that was shelved after the musical’s failure—had been rediscovered. That, together with some private footage (including a priceless scene where Sondheim, at a birthday party, previews a song that will appear in the show) allows for a contrast that mirrors the perspective of the musical itself: the sunlit hopes of theater-mad youth versus middle-aged disappointment and disillusionment.

Although both Sondheim and Prince open up about why they believe the show closed after only 16 performances (critics could not abide the two collaborators being both mavericks and successes, Sondheim says), it is fellow cast members who offer Price the most fascinating insights.

Some went on to prominent careers in entertainment, including “Seinfeld”s Jason Alexander, Tony Award-winning actress Tonya Pinkins, singer Liz Callaway, actor Giancarlo Esposito, and Jim Walton, a longtime Broadway fixture. Others struggled on the margins of the industry or even dropped out altogether, such as Ann Morrison, the principal female cast member; Jim Weissenbach, the show’s original Franklin Shepard, who now runs a talent agency; and Abby Pogrebin, who became a CBS producer and successful author. No matter how they turned out, a sense of acrid failure over the show’s failure clings, to one extent or another, to virtually everyone.

While Weissenbach reacts, with quiet bewilderment, to his firing and replacement in the principal role by Walton (claiming that neither Prince nor Sondheim gave him any sense he was doing anything wrong beforehand), the dominant note throughout is poignant, sometimes painful or even teary-eyed, particularly in the cases of Morrison, Pogrebin, and Price.

The musical’s previews—so disastrous that actors were sometimes singing to the backs of audience members heading for the exits—necessitated a blizzard of major last-minute changes unusual even for a major Broadway opening. Partly because of the decision to take the show straight to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout, rumors of problems multiplied, and critics pounced at the opening, ignoring larger facts in front of them: the brilliance of Sondheim’s score and the marvelous young talents in front of them.

Against all odds, the musical has gone on to a wondrous afterlife, continually performed around the world—including,  the film’s postscript notes, by children of the original cast members. But it’s hard to see how any of these performances could have topped the 2002 concert revival that reunited the original cast members. The exhilaration from that event, still palpable onscreen here, was such that Sondheim and Prince even reunited for a new musical (alas, also not successful), Bounce.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened has been out a couple of months already and therefore likely to appear on DVD, public television or cable station soon. If you have a chance, I strongly urge you to see this look at a musical that became famous for its spectacularly public death, only to enjoy an unexpectedly triumphant afterlife.