Singing history At long last Pacific Overtures BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Pacific Overtures Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by John Weidman. Additional material by Hugh Wheeler. Directed by Kent Gash. Music direction by M. Michael Fauss. Choreographed by Darren Lee and Francis Jue. Set by Neil Patel. Lighting by William Grant III. Costumes by Paul Tazewell. Sound by John A. Stone. With Raul Aranas, Billy Bustamante, Steven Eng, Mikio Hirata, Jason Ma, Allan Mangaser, Tony Marinyo, and Alan Muraoka. At North Shore Music Theatre through September 14.

What a rare treat it is to revisit Pacific Overtures, a musical that, despite the near-deification of Stephen Sondheim over the years, has not seen professional production in these parts since its troubled 1975 pre-Broadway tryout. It is a tribute to Sondheim that, regardless of the musical’s complete absence from Boston stages, the intricate, Japanese-tinged score is familiar — and ravishing. Moreover, it is well enough sung to induce prickles and a smile at North Shore Music Theatre, in a sturdy if not exquisite revival that’s the joint effort of NSMT, Cincinnati Playhouse, and Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, whose associate artistic director, Kent Gash, is at the helm. Of the show, that is, not of the American warship whose fire-breathing 1853 arrival in Kanagawa drags feudal, isolated Japan into a world of bullying nations whose mouths are as wide open as baby birds’ and clamoring for Sony.

Perhaps the most audacious gambit of Sondheim and director Harold Prince, who began reinventing the American musical with the 1970 Company, Pacific Overtures deals not with hearts and flowers and Oklahoma but with the forcible opening of Japan to trade with Western nations. It takes its title directly from the diaries of Commodore Matthew Perry, who was at the helm of the boats that barged into Japan on a mission to deliver a missive from then-president Millard Fillmore. In the play, the Japanese, who had banned foreign "barbarians" from their soil 250 years earlier, turn a blind eye to the inevitable, work out an ingenious scheme to placate the courteously threatening Perry and his expedition, and expect everyone to go away. Instead, in the amusing "Please Hello," which burlesques national as well as musical stereotypes, they find themselves barraged by a UN of merchant invaders.

John Weidman’s book, though revised for a 1984 Off Broadway revival that did better than the Broadway original (which lasted only 193 performances), is still stiff. It grafts a skeletal human story onto the historic progression that is the play’s true subject; we see public events from the point of view of a low-ranking samurai appointed to repel the Americans and from that of an Americanized fisherman who in the end cleaves to tradition. But though the musical carries a heavy conceptual club, Prince’s original notions — to demonstrate the modernization of the "Floating Kingdom" via a melding of kabuki, noh, and Broadway stylization and to portray events from the Japanese point of view — remain striking. And Sondheim’s score, fashioned on the Orient’s pentatonic scale, is among his catchiest and most melodious, albeit punctuated by some atonal chanting. One hardly needs to point out that, given the US’s current barge-in policy, the show’s wry portrayal of clashing cultures — with the Americans at first depicted as kabuki-style demons and the Japanese eventually taking to bowler hats — is timely.

Prince’s production was extremely beautiful — though a financial failure, it won Tonys for sets and costumes as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. Gash’s, which had to be restaged for NSMT’s theater in the round, is necessarily skimpier on sets, but the kimonos are sumptuous and the kabuki effects graceful. Moreover, the all-male Asian cast (two women serve as kurogos, moving set pieces, robing the characters, and manipulating the animated puppet emperor; they don’t show their faces until the hectic, pulsing finale) manages a combination of stylization and believability that keeps the proceedings from turning into The Mikado–meets–La Cage aux Folles. The female characterizations, especially Allan Mangaser’s of Tamate, the young wife who dances to the haunting "There Is No Other Way," are not only convincing but moving.

Stephen Eng is a somewhat androgynous Kayama, the samurai who falls for high tea and the bowler hat. Raul Aranas is a commanding Reciter, delivering the commentary haikus with irony. Billy Bustamante makes flashy work of Perry’s first-act-ending "Lion Dance," a number that encapsulates the musical’s theme, moving from percussive kabuki tradition to drum-major struts and quotations of George M. Cohan. Mikio Hirata combines deference with dragon lady as the mother of the weak Shogun, slowly and politely poisoning her son to the rhythmic tune of "Chrysanthemum Tea." And Alan Muraoka, Randy Reyes, and Erwin G. Urbi harmonize well on the complex and gorgeous "Someone in a Tree," which makes the point that, like a tree falling in the forest, history doesn’t happen unless someone takes it in.