|
Musical theater buffs thrive on scarcity, and few things were
scarcer last week than tickets to Stephen Sondheim's Pacific
Overtures at the York Theater and the NYU Theater
Department's production of South Pacific. I guess that
means I'm far from alone in preferring intimate, re-imagined
revivals of Broadway shows to the splashy original
productions.
The York Theater Company performs in a church on the Upper
East Side (Church of the Heavenly Rest), so when you walk in
you smell "low budget" and your expectations are
sufficiently lowered that the resourcefulness of the
production takes your breath away. It starts in the very first
number when director Fran Soeder, with the simplest means of
staging and lighting, establishes four layers of visual depth
by the end of the first chorus, and it continues through to
the very end of the show when the actors come out mostly in
contemporary street dress, some with period makeup on, and the
audience gets to look closely at them, dozens of impressions
of Asian culture from Kabuki to Flashdance fashion to
the corner Korean vegetable market mingling in one theatrical
tableau.
Pacific Overtures has always seemed a formidable work
by Sondheim, both because the score experiments with Eastern
repetition and song forms, and because the concept seems heady
and intellectual. A Broadway musical that uses the opening of
the Orient as a metaphor for the mixed blessing of progress?
Dozens of exquisite ambivalences make the show seem terribly
complicated in theory, but the York production came off as
quite clear and very beautiful in portraying the counterpoints
of the story. Everything is parallel action -- for instance,
the main stories depict a Westernized Japanese sailor who
learns to embrace his heritage and becomes a samurai, and a
lowly peasant who rises through official responsibility to
become a petit bourgeois bureaucrat. And the numbers are
theatrically conceived to convey techniques of Eastern theater
in an accessible manner -- "There Is No Other Way"
is sung by two male observers while a man playing a woman
enacts silently a wife's preparation to kill herself rather
than suffer her husband's disgrace (very well performed,
incidentally, by John Baray, Tim Ewing, and Lester Mau).
There are other wonderful songs ("Welcome to
Kanagawa," "Pretty Lady," "A Bowler
Hat") but the show's most spectacular set piece is
"Someone in a Tree," which manages to condense the
show's meaning in one incident while being narratively
unorthodox and emotionally moving at the same time. An old
man, his younger self, the show's narrator, and a soldier who
literally comes out of nowhere recall the conference where the
first treaty between the U.S. and Japan was signed with no
awareness whatever of its historical significance. One of the
song's several interlocking refrains goes, "I'm a
fragment of the day -- I am here," and it expresses an
amazing combination of sentiments (being a part of history and
yet outside it, being fully alive here and now yet a speck in
the eye of time) that I continue to chew over).
Ernest Abuba is quite wonderful as the show's narrator, even
if his singing could be better, and there are very good
performances as well by Francis Jue (the boy in "Someone
in a Tree"), Thomas Ideda, and Henry Ravelo, although all
the actors play multiple roles and are generally quite good.
James Morgan's set, Mary Jo Dandlinger's lighting, and Mark
Passerell's costumes are all commendable, and those always
looking for the future in musical theater should keep an eye
on Fran Soeder.
I'd say the same about Anne Bogart, except that her vision as
a director is so subversive I can't imagine mainstream
producers taking an interest. Her astonishing version of South
Pacific used 39 students and five musicians to create an
Orwellian rethinking of the show, setting it in an institution
where Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals are used to teach
disturbed kids to adjust to proper (rigid) social roles. [Note:
I later learned that I misunderstood this premise -- they were
supposed to be shell-shocked war veterans being rehabilitated
back into civilian society.]
A clinical/sinister white-coated doctor supervised all the
proceedings without a word, and the musicians were dressed as
nurses and interns accompanying a sort of talent-show pageant
put on by their hyperactive charges. Once introduced, this
conceptual framework remained subsidiary to the melodrama of South
Pacific except when things got out of hand, as they
periodically did (not unlike Marat/Sade, which of
course must have been a model of sorts for the production).
And in the final moment of the show, just when we were
rejoicing that Emile had won the girl by forsaking his nasty
individuality and fighting the Japs with the rest of the good
old American team, all the kids turned and paid tribute with
trinkets and smiles to the Big Brother-like head doctor.
"The whole picture of the South Pacific has changed"
-- indeed!
Both exaggerating and sending up old-fashioned musicals' ideas
of enforced heterosexuality and patriotism (which, like hate
and fear, have to be "Carefully Taught," as the
show's big message and song go), Bogart's South Pacific
was hilariously funny, at times a bit confused conceptually
(what was that battle scene in act two all about?), but
effectively satirical. It could have been a campy spoof of the
past or a Ping Chong-like futuristic fantasy, but what made it
so chilling was how perfectly it caught today's Yuppie
conformism.
Surprisingly for such an avant-garde event, the score was
taken very seriously and for the most part beautifully sung
(especially by Geoffrey Nauffts as Cable, the guy who sings
"Younger than Springtime," and Malerie Rose, very
Bette-Midler-doing-Brecht as Bloody Mary). Bogart got a lot of
help from musical director Jeff Halpern and choreographer Mary
Overlie on such brilliant sequences as the half-naked boys'
jitterbugging with each other before breaking into "There
Is Nothing Like a Dame," the leggy girls' Busby Berkeley
routine in the middle of "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right
Out of My Hair" (rising to an insane pitch as the inmates
got stuck on "I'm in love I'm in love I'm in love I'm in
love I'm in love I'm in..."), the syntho-Polynesian Nina
Hagenesque rendition of "Happy Talk," and
"Honey Bun," the big drag number with girls in tuxes
and boys in gowns joyously acting out sexual degradation while
making the weird most of Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics ("I
call her hips Twirly and Whirly" -- ???). And for a
student production, it was extraordinarily well designed. Ted
Boerner's set used neutral white screens and Plexiglas walls
to create a dozen different playing spaces.
Martha Clarke's The Garden of Earthly Delights,
produced by Lyn Austin's Music-Theater Performing Group at St.
Clement's, is a visually arresting dance-drama based on
Hieronymus Bosch's painting of the same name. As an abstract
work, it's quite wonderful in suggesting that movement is
music taken into another dimension and vice versa, playing
images of primitive civilization and concrete existence (trees
and potatoes are the major props) against images of fantasy
and flight. But like Clarke's adaptation of Kafka, A
Metamorphosis in Miniature, it is too nice. Bosch's work
is savage, dark, frightening in ways never suggested by
Clarke's lovely dance.
New York Beat, April 18, 1984
|
