Word: kabuki
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...look at the moon, the visual impact of Pacific Overtures is ravishingly beautiful. The screens and sets (Boris Aronson) and costumes (Florence Klotz) transport one hypnotically into the realm of ukiyoe, the "floating world" of the Japanese print. The shape and tone of the show is that of a Kabuki-styled operetta. It is audaciously ambitious and flagrantly pretentious. Pacific Overtures attempts to portray the Westernization of Japan after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's trade mission in 1853. The appearance of Perry's battleship is the evening's showstopper. First the prow with...
Would that the plot and characters moved with the same authority. The cast is all Oriental and, in Kabuki style, uses men even in most of the women's roles. Much of the show's inaction rests with a narrator aptly called "Reciter" (Mako). Kabuki notwithstanding, this ignores the spare and intensely dramatic injunction that Gertrude Stein gave Hemingway: "Don't describe; render...
...amount of elegant screens, Oriental cosmetics and Kabuki finesse can conceal the simple-mindedness of that line of thought...
...idea of doing the show started when John Weidman [scriptwriter] came to me about three years ago and suggested a realistic production of Perry's visit to Japan, and I said that same day, "Let's do it as Kabuki." It was an idea about a period of history which had consumed him when he was a student here at Harvard. Apparently I said that I wasn't interested in realistic theater, but that it could be fascinating if we'd do it from the point of view of a Japanese playwright utilizing the Kabuki style. We did not think...
...myself what? And I found out that in order to translate the Japanese poetical style into a style for Americans, it's got to be either blank verse, which I wanted no part of, or music with lyrics. I figured that only lyrics would give it the size that Kabuki has and that we lack. What we're doing is borrowing in contemporary terms from the Kabuki tradition; I refuse to do pure Kabuki because I wouldn't know how. I think anything can be a musical...