The Musical as Drama

These numbers stop the show. “Someone in a Tree” stops it
because it surrounds a book scene that is not there, a turning
point that lies beyond narration. A spot of absence in the plot is
being sung about as though it were a presence, and the fullness
of the music resonates not against character or action or any
other part of the book but against a vacancy. When the book
does resume, it leaves behind a demon, the bizarre figure of the
Kabuki Admiral Perry, whose Lion Dance reflects the conflict
of the entire musical. It is a moment of sheer performance
in which one reads the Japanese/American situation through
wordless dance.
Why it should be the cakewalk that is imposed on the tradi-
tional Japanese dance? The cakewalk was invented by slaves in
America, black people who were mocking the fancy ways of
white society while keeping in touch with the syncopation of
remembered African song and dance. The real Admiral Perry
would have done the cakewalk no more often than he did a
Kabuki Lion Dance. Assigning it incongruously to this fright-
ful Admiral Perry is a reminder that the United States has
engaged other races and other cultures before the Japanese.
The cakewalk routine puts Admiral Perry’s power into touch
with the slavery on which it is founded. Nowhere else in Pacific
Overturesis this connection made. It is made here without
words, strictly in a number that keeps its distance from the
book and is capable of adding its wordless meaning by remain-
ing apart.
The difference between lyric time and progressive time is to
the point here, and one can dwell on the idea that Japanese
culture, capable of the grace and restraint of the haiku, holds
more firmly to lyric time than does American culture, with
its drive toward narrative progress. The numbers have been
largely Japanese in orientation in act 1. A particularly lovely
song has been an exchange of haiku verses between two of the
leading Japanese characters. It is called “Your Turn,” because it
turns from one man to the other and back again, a back and
forth of haikus that refuses narrative time in favor of repetitive
time, although the men are on a journey that will have a disas-
trous outcome.

206 CHAPTER EIGHT