"Pacific Overtures" is an audacious attempt to create a musical play by mixing American sensibility and technique with those of Japan—specifically the ancient Kabuki theater. When 28-year-old John Weidman showed Prince a play he'd written about the opening of Japan to the West in 1853 by Commodore Matthew Perry, the producer got the idea of turning it into the fourth musical of his fruitful collaboration with composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The result is the most original—though not the best—product of Prince's brilliant atelier….

No other team in the American theater could have achieved this show's integration of elements, its harmony of form, color, sound and movement. Sondheim's feeling for the weight and wit of measured language allows him to deftly absorb Japanese poetic forms such as haiku into his lyrics. And his parallel gift for the histrionic shapes and gestures of music lets him slip with sneaky...