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December 3, 2004
TT: The West did it (but Japan helped)
Friday again, and I've reviewed two shows in today's Wall Street Journal, the Roundabout Theatre Company's Pacific Overtures and Playwrights Horizons' Rodney's Wife.Pacific Overtures is a triumph:
This is one of the most entrancingly beautiful shows ever to come to Broadway. Even if you don't like it, you won't be sorry to have seen it.
Originally produced in 1976, "Pacific Overtures" tells the once-familiar story of the naval expedition led by Commodore Perry that opened Japan to the West in 1853--but tells it from the Japanese point of view. The characters are played by Asian-Americans (Perry is a giant monster in a mask). John Weidman's book makes use of narrative techniques derived from Noh theater, while Mr. Sondheim's iridescent score melds the spare, percussive textures of Japanese music with his own Ravel-perfumed harmonies.
What makes this production still more individual is that it has been staged and choreographed by a Japanese director, Amon Miyamoto. When I first saw it a few years ago at the Lincoln Center Festival, it was even sung in Japanese (with English supertitles). That deliciously distancing touch is gone from this English-language version, but Mr. Miyamoto and his designers have otherwise been careful to present "Pacific Overtures" in an idiomatically Japanese style, with simple décor that implies as much as it states. The staging is a synthesis of dance and naturalistic movement so thoroughgoing as to recall the similar approach of Jerome Robbins in "West Side Story." It is masterly in every way....
Mr. Miyamoto was wise not to italicize any of the parts of "Pacific Overtures" that can be read as anti-American, especially since I'm sure there wasn't a soul in Studio 54 who didn't get the point. (The capacity of New York playgoers for liberal guilt is infinite.) In any case, the show mostly steers clear of cheap ugly-Americanism. It is, rather, a subtle meditation on the myriad ways in which two cultures can misunderstand one another--the Japanese themselves are portrayed no less frankly than their "barbarian" visitors--and its true subject is the inescapable tragedy of the coming of modernity, which takes as much as it gives....
The second isn't, but you should think about seeing it anyway:
I didn't like all of Richard Nelson's "Rodney's Wife," which opened Wednesday at Playwrights Horizons, but it didn't bore me for a second, either, and the good parts, of which there are many, are most impressive.
It's hard to write about "Rodney's Wife" because the plot turns on a showstopping surprise that I mustn't give away (though I figured it out at least a half-hour before Mr. Nelson officially tipped his hand). Suffice it to say that the play is about an over-the-hill movie star (David Strathairn), his bitchy second wife (Haviland Morris), his recently widowed sister (Maryann Plunkett), his visibly upset daughter (Jessica Chastain) and the daughter's fiancé (Jesse Pennington), all of whom are thrown together in Rome circa 1962 for a dinner party that soon degenerates into a near-orgy of passive-aggressive sniping. Two of the characters, we learn, are keeping an explosive secret from the others, and all hell breaks loose when it finally comes out (get the hint?).
The bad parts include a gratuitous prologue and epilogue and a pat, unconvincing denouement. The good parts include lots of sharp-eared dialogue, directed with a sure hand by Mr. Nelson himself and performed by a cast that never lets you down....
No link. Get yourself a Journal, or go here and do it the easy way.
Posted December 3, 2004 12:02 PM
