Floating World

By T.E. Kalem

PACIFIC OVERTURES Music and Lyrics by STEPHEN SONDHEIM Book by JOHN WEIDMAN Scenic Design by BORIS ARONSON

Producer Harold Prince and Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim are men of giant daring, gifts and vision. In Company and Follies, they gave the U.S. musical theater new horizons. The corollary of valorous risks is the occasional mishap. Pacific Overtures might be called Prince and Sondheim's moonwalk musical. They land, but the dramatic terrain proves to be as arid and airless as the moon.

Unlike a closeup look at the moon, the visual impact of Pacific Overtures is ravishingly beautiful. The screens and sets (Boris Aronson) and costumes (Florence Klotz) transport one hypnotically into the realm of ukiyoe, the "floating world" of the Japanese print. The shape and tone of the show is that of a Kabuki-styled operetta. It is audaciously ambitious and flagrantly pretentious. Pacific Overtures attempts to portray the Westernization of Japan after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's trade mission in 1853. The appearance of Perry's battleship is the evening's showstopper. First the prow with two baleful headlights looms in the dusk. Then, in accordion fashion, the rest of the ship spills into being like a black dragon. It is a breath-catching moment.

Would that the plot and characters moved with the same authority. The cast is all Oriental and, in Kabuki style, uses men even in most of the women's roles. Much of the show's inaction rests with a narrator aptly called "Reciter" (Mako). Kabuki notwithstanding, this ignores the spare and intensely dramatic injunction that Gertrude Stein gave Hemingway: "Don't describe; render."

Wind and Whirlwind. Much of the evening resembles a lecture interspersed with picture slides. On cue, a cavalcade of people troop across the stage; samurai and sailors, fishermen and merchants, ladies of pleasure and constant wives, a wax puppet of an emperor and a Perry (Haruki Fujimoto) who stomps out a "lion dance" with his long white mane flailing the air. Pacific Overtures swallows them all like the sea.

Sondheim's score counterbalances this by being agile and clever in the way only he can be. But his forte is sophisticated parody, and only in a song called Someone in a Tree does palpable emotion linger. The final impression is that the show belongs to the flagellant school of contemporary American selfcriticism. Whether he means to or not, Prince seems to be arguing that the U.S. opened up Japan by force, sowing the wind of brutalizing social change and thus reaping the whirlwind of Pearl Harbor and global commercial competition.

No amount of elegant screens, Oriental cosmetics and Kabuki finesse can conceal the simple-mindedness of that line of thought.

Boris Aronson is 76, but he has obviously drunk at some fountain of creative vigor. He was born in Kiev, where at eight he wandered into an opera house and was transfixed with the beauty of a peacock painted on a stage curtain. He remained transfixed. Aronson studied set designing and in 1923 embarked on that large, frightening and decisive immigrant's gamble: the ship to New York and the land of opportunity. In 1927, he won his initial Broadway designing credit for a show called 2 x 2 = 5. It was the first of 88 sets for theater, opera and ballet that bear his name. They include South Pacific, The Rose Tattoo, I Am a Camera, Bus Stop, Diary of Anne Frank and JB.

But the golden years of his half-century career have been the past decade, when he has designed all of Hal Prince's musicals from Cabaret to Pacific Overtures. To see his work is like seeing the graph of a sensitive mind in motion. His perception of Company: "Movement in New York is vertical, horizontal, angular, never casual. In Versailles, you bow; in New York, you dodge cabs. Finally, I conceived a set that was basically a gymnasium for acting."

Fans and Prints. When Prince was planning Cabaret in 1966, he told Aronson that he saw similarities between what was happening in Germany in the immediate pre-Hitler era and what was happening in the U.S. Boris asked himself: " 'How do I convey this comparison to an audience?' It occurred to me to hang a huge mirror tilted on the stage which reflected the audience. It said, 'Look at yourselves.' "

Pacific Overtures culminates two lifelong love affairs for Boris Aronson, one with painting (he will soon hold his tenth one-man show), and the other with the prints and toys of Japan. To prepare for Overtures, Boris collected Japanese kites (a large black kite is used on the opening curtain). He studied the way Japanese wrap things; bamboo structures, for example, are held together by wrapping them in reeds or rattan. He also collected Japanese fans and Japanese prints of Perry's warships. In his cliffside home overlooking the Hudson River located near the town of Nyack, N.Y., Aronson's study is filled with hundreds of sketches for the show. Each one is intricately painted. Some, including half a dozen potential stage curtains, are silk-screened on cotton. Some are done on rice paper, but New York City's fire laws forbid their use in the theater.

Says Aronson: "The Japanese artist has a peculiar way of seeing things. For instance, the white backdrops in Pacific Overtures are the way in which the Japanese depict clouds. Since this is a play about issues and not about people and moods, Hal and I decided on white lighting. The white shows everything on stage. It has a crispness, a simplicity, a directness about it." The entire show is lit by the harmony and taste of Boris Aronson's vision.

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