Weidman

Under Tim Dang’s intrepid direction, East West Players’ revival of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s mind-blowingly ambitious 1976 musical went off with pyrotechnic brilliance.

East West Players has a long history with “Pacific Overtures,” Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 1976 musical about the opening of Japan to international trade by American warships in 1853 and the historical ramifications no one could have predicted.

Sondheim and Weidman administer this lesson with musical theater poetry.

Sondheim and Weidman set out to create a show that examines a watershed moment in Japanese history through a Japanese cultural perspective.

With a book by John Weidman, the show chronicles a period of Japanese history after American warships under the command of Commodore Matthew C. Perry entered Japanese waters in 1853 to force the isolationist nation to open up trade.