‘Pacific Overtures’ Gets an East West Encore

AMERICAN THEATRE: “Pardon me, I was there,” sings an old man near the end of the first act of Pacific Overtures. He’s addressing the show’s narrator, called the Reciter, who is recounting the fateful day in 1854 when a treaty was hammered out between the U.S. and Japan to “open” the hitherto isolated island to Western trade—a negotiation of which there is no official Japanese account.