SOURCE: Sutcliffe, Tom. “Sondheim and the Musical.” Musical Times 128, no. 1735 (September 1987): 487-90.

In the following essay, Sutcliffe maintains that Pacific Overtures is “the most unusual of all Sondheim's musicals.”

The English National Opera, like similar German opera houses, has sometimes extended its repertory beyond operetta to the American musical. In 1970 they did Kiss Me Kate at the Coliseum, the unfading 1948 Broadway hit by Cole Porter and the Spewaks, based on The Taming of the Shrew. But the decision to open the coming ENO season this month with Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures, which had a short Broadway run in 1976, is a new kind of venture. For Sondheim's musicals are not classics in the usual sense, hallowed by long-term popularity. They are resolute pace-setters in the genre, almost invariably way ahead of the commercial audience for which they are designed. ‘It's always true in art’, Sondheim says, ‘that what has...