This is the Stephen Sondheim musical I least expected to see revived, let alone as nimbly as in this thrilling co-production between the Menier and Osaka’s Umeda Arts Theater.
Written in 1976 with a book by John Weidman, it tells how the US forced hermetic, shogunate Japan to open up to commerce in 1853. Told from the Asian perspective, its score and staging fuse 20th-century western and classic Japanese performance genres, including the declamatory style of kabuki. Wait, stop, don’t go away - Matthew White’s production is a revelation.
This is the chamber version with just ten musical numbers that Sondheim and Weidman created with Hugh Wheeler in 2017 and it bowls merrily along. We go from the opening paean to tradition, The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea, to the hectic, closing number Next – which anticipates skyscrapers, modern warfare and in this staging AI - in 105-interval-free minutes.
As epitomised by these two songs, the score is full of riffs and circular references. The music is beautifully intricate, the lyrics wittily wrought to fit the cadences of formal Japanese address or rude Western pidgin. White’s production, unrolling like a scroll on a traverse stage, is exquisitely designed by Paul Farnsworth (set) and Ayako Maeda (costumes), and includes the prow of a battleship rendered in silk. The singing is dramatic or quietly reflective rather than melodious, and the acting broadly comic. But then, this chunk of geo-political history has a funny streak as wide as Tokyo harbour.
When four US gunboats turn up here the shogun (Saori Oda, doubling neatly as the Madam of the geisha tea house) instructs hapless samurai Kayama (Takuro Ohno, stirringly good) to tell the Yanks to go home. They don’t, but with the help of Americanised fisherman Manjiro (a charismatic Joaquin Pedro Valdes) he fudges a compromise that saves everyone’s face. They become friends and receive advancement from the child emperor. But when the Americans come back and crack Japan open for other empires – in the hilariously sophisticated song Please Hello – their fates express the pitfalls of globalization and isolationism.
Jon Chew as the Reciter, a narrator sporting the punky pompadour of a gameshow host, has a fine singing voice and conducts matters with a remote control that conjures images of flying cranes or the blood spatter of samurai sword slashes. The shadow of cultural stereotyping that hangs over the show is lessened since most of the cast are of Asian origin and it has already been performed in Tokyo and Osaka, in Japanese. This is the first revival of Sondheim’s singular, peculiar musical since his death in 2021 and it is a wonderful, bijou surprise.
Menier Chocolate Factory, until Feb 24; get tickets here
