The London critics do not seem impressed:
Small victory for a big show Reducing the size of a show can increase its impact, says the director of Pacific Overtures.
By David Benedict for The Independent
Sondheim and Weidman's East-West musical Pacific Overtures is big. Or, at least, it was when originally staged in 1976 at Broadway's vast Winter Garden theatre - there were 22 in the band alone. The current revival, however, which began life almost two years ago at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, is a lot leaner. Gary Griffin, the director, has reinvented it for 10 actors and four musicians.
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Pacific Overtures Powerful reworking of Sondheim's musical of gunboats and kimonos. By Paul Taylor for The Independent
At the Barbican currently, you can see The Elephant Vanishes, a brilliant multi-media show about the surreal stresses of living in the hyper-modernity of contemporary Japan. By a neat coincidence, the Donmar Warehouse now unveils a revival of Pacific Overtures, the 1976 Stephen Sondheim musical that dramatises the ironic origins of Japan's hi-tech capitalist frenzy. In 1853, American gunboats, under the command of Commodore Perry, forced an end to Japan's 250 years of inward-looking isolation.
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Smart but hopelessly sterile Charles Spencer reviews Pacific Overtures at the Donmar Warehouse for The Daily Telegraph
Even by the demanding standards of Stephen Sondheim, Pacific Overtures is an exceptionally daunting musical. As the man himself remarked, shortly before the show opened on Broadway in 1976, it is one of "the most bizarre and unusual musicals ever to be seen in a commercial setting", and, as so often with Sondheim, it proved caviar to the general, closing after 193 performances with the loss of its entire investment.
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