MAKING OVERT OVERTURES

...Pacific Overtures is a mixture of Eastern and Western musical styles and theatrical devices in the service of an account of the Westernization of Japan...

...It is sometimes funny, sometimes blunt satire, as artificial as Sondheim's but without being effective in its use of that artificiality, as Soyinka has been on other occasions (Oba Danlola's scenes in Kongi's Harvest, the games of the mendicants in Madmen and Specialists...

...The Americans arrive in Japan with pious platitudes and the threat of violence, and the other Westerners who come hard on their heels have the same sense of international propriety as a vehicle of commercial greed...

...My initial responses were colored by the unfortunate circumstances of the performance, but I think I could see the play clearly enough to make a tentative report...

...For more than thirty years The King and I has been the standard East-meets-West American musical (Yul Brynner has it on the boards again) with its "The Small House of Uncle Thomas'' an almost perfect example of the kind of condescension likely to invade the charm of any Broadway attempt at such a cultural mix...

...It had a respectable twenty-week run, but in these days when big investments demand big success, it was a failure by Broadway standards...

...He played the second act with vigor and no sign of strain...

...Although "Small House" was clearly and admirably the work of Jerome Robbins, it was ostensibly the product of the naive Siamese presenters of Mrs...

...Kamini (the Idi Amin figure) is presented as vain and sentimental, sly but obtuse...

...Stowe's very American story...

...The most recent Sondheim show, Sunday in the Park with George, is now proving that a musical of ideas (aesthetic, not political and social this time) can draw Broadway audiences...

...Such a subject, treated venomously, could be a simple indictment of Western imperialism, but Sondheim and John Weidman, who wrote the book, are after more complex effects...

...From the first years of African independence, he has refused to disregard the ugly acts of tyrants who substitute "black jackboots" for "colonial boots," as he told an interviewer in the New Haven Advocate (November 28,1984...

...There is a hilarious and hilariously nasty scene in Pacific Overtures in which the Western ambassadors sweep in on the cheerful strains of parody (Offenbach, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc...

...Pacific Overtures avoids that pitfall by the thematic harshness described above and by its obvious artificiality...

...On the night I saw Giants, Roger Robinson, who had the most demanding role, became ill early in the first act...

...The giants in the play that Soyinka subtitles "A Fantasia on the Aminian Theme" are four African dictators, based on Bokassa, Mobutu, Ngeuma, and Idi Amin...

...One of the most amusing scenes in the show is the almost slapstick "Chrysanthemum Tea," in which the Shogun's mother (played by a man, as are all the women's parts) poisons the effete Shogun, whom she thinks too weak to face the Americans...

...Not only in its four dictators, but in the Russian and American U. N. delegates (Mary-Alan Hokanson marvelously suggests Jeane Kirkpat-rick without imitating her), the self- and other-deluding black American professor and politician, and the Swedish apologist/mistress, Giants makes no attempt at subtlety...

...His most effective statement of theme is the device which both defines the chief character and gives the play whatever plot it has...

...GERALD WEALES Commonweal: 86...

...In scene after scene, incapable of following any but the simplest remarks, he lifts a single word or phrase out of a speech whose import has escaped him, builds a response onit — often a cruel one — and settles back in self-congratulatory complacence at his correctness...

...It is a society in which the class structure is oppressive, the government corrupt when it is not inept, and casual violence is as prevalent as excessive politeness...

...The musical scenes in Pacific Overtures are overtly the conception of Sondheim, Weidman, the directors and the performers — comments on, not presentations of, conflicting ways of perceiving...

...When Perry appears at the end of act 1, a kabuki lion in a naval officer's coat, his dance is less an animation of the Perry-monsters in Japanese drawings than Sondheim's acknowledgement and use of such fantasticality...

...Giants was a disappointment to an admirer like me who prefers Soyinka when he modifies traditional African ritual to express his contemporary ideas (The Road, Death and the King's Horsemen...

...8 February 1985: 85 Stage CULTURAL MIXES MAKING OVERT OVERTURES f f #fc NE OF THE THINGS that interested me about Pacific ¦ I Overtures," Stephen Sondheim once said (New %0 York Times, February 25, 1979), "was to see if you could do a musical of ideas.'' Broadway was not ready for the ideas, the music, or the combination when Sondheim's musical opened in 1976...

...Yet, even when Soyinka's theatrical inventiveness is not used to its fullest, he has important things to say about Africa in particular, the world in general...

...His immediate butts are not only such African rulers, but also the great powers whose acquiescence helps sustain them...

...and with a great show of amiability force their ever increasing demands on the Japanese...

...Yet, the country to which they come is not the unspoiled paradise of conventional anti-imperialism...

...Soyinka's genre this time is conventional political farce, and his satiric method is the overstatement of Kongi''s Harvest...

...Too often, in Giants, Soyinka shrinks his skills as a marksman by making his targets too large...

...He insisted on playing and, despite the skill of the performers in masking his infirmity, everyone on and off stage went through the first act apprehensive of the disaster which happily did not come...

...There is no doubt about Soyinka's serious intentions in Giants...

...Perhaps for that reason, Pacific Overtures is back — and in a fine off-Broadway production...

...Pretty Lady'' is a sweet song made sour by the fact that the three British sailors sing prettily as a prelude to an attempt to buy sex, and by our certainty that they will be — as they are — cut down by the pretty lady's samurai father...

...One might argue that it is impossible to overstate men like Bokassa and Idi Amin, outrageously comic and outrageously bloody, but grotesque caricature in life is different from that on stage...

...The immediate event is the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, who brought warships to Japan in 1853 as the most sensible instrument for his peaceful mission to open Japan to Western trade...

...To describe the ideational underlay of the musical so bluntly is to be misleading, for the scenes are designed to be funny, charming, touching, sometimes a bit acid, their surface oddly strengthening the serious implications they seem to belie...

...It is altogether proper, in the farcically violent worlds of the play and international politics, that he take his titles literally, his rhetoric as reality, and the letter of international law as binding (the Bugara Embassy is Bugaran territory), and builds them into an explosive finale which presumably destroys not only him and his fellow giants, but the American and Russian delegates and the Secretary General as well...

...It may seem an abrupt leap from Sondheim to Wole Soyinka, but the national types that gather in the Bugara Embassy in A Play of Giants, which recently had its world premiere at the Yale Rep, are cartoons as broad and as serious in their farce as those in Pacific Overtures...

...The play's repetitions, in act and word, tend to weaken the bite in the satire...

...Beyond that, his larger theme is "the taste of absolute power...

...The incidental music is from Wagner's The Twilight of the Gods, but for Soyinka its use is probably not only a joke, but wishful thinking...