The movie overture—music set against a blank screen or still images before the drama unfolds—all but disappeared from film sometime in the 1970s. Once a Hollywood mainstay, overtures evolved naturally ...

Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” is one of the master songwriter’s most rarely performed works. The show begins in 1853 and tells the tale of how an isolationist Japan was westernized when ...

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 ...

Even if the Bayreuth festival persists in ignoring everything Wagner composed before The Flying Dutchman, Wagnerians generally acknowledge that his career began with his first two completed operas, ...

George Takei, who recently starred in the Broadway musical Allegiance, has been cast as "Reciter" in Classic Stage Company's upcoming production of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's PACIFIC ...

Kunoichi Productions has revealed the cast and creative team for John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s PACIFIC OVERTURES, performing May 30–June 15, 2025 at San Francisco’s Brava Theater. Mixing ...

Somewhere on the musical-theater periodic table between the work of Bertolt Brecht and Rodgers and Hammerstein sits “Pacific Overtures.” A geopolitical history lesson wrapped in a Japanese fable ...

Every New York production of John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures has its own strong idiosyncrasies. In the 1976 premiere, director Harold Prince treated it as an all-male ...

The youthful Schubert wrote some 20 stage works which remain almost entirely unknown and unperformed. Judging from some of these 10 overtures, that's hardly surprising. The future supreme master of ...

"Pacific Overtures" chimes freshly resonant chords in a new London staging that finds a 1976 musical that's taken up with history also intersecting with it anew. Returning to the repertoire of Stephen ...