Pacific Overtures revival is bare yet flowering

New York

STEPHEN Sondheim says that a major inspiration for Pacific Overtures, the 1976 musical now being revived at Classic Stage Company, was a three-panel Japanese screen he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nearly two-thirds of it was blank. How could so much beauty explode from so much emptiness?

John Weidman, who wrote the musical's book, says that, for him, the idea was born in an East Asian history class at Harvard. Why had he never been taught about America's brutal "opening" of Japan and its consequences?