What Will Audiences Experience

-Thanks to assistant director Sean Kelly for offering this insight.

A night in at the theatre involves many expectations on the part of the audience. Based on their previous experience in the theatre, an audience member comes to understand the rules, traditions and conventions involved in a theatre event. The lights will flash during intermission to alert me that the show is about to resume. We all rely upon these expectations as a contract between audience and actors that helps to guide us through the experience. Pacific Overtures is a Kabuki Broadway musical. What is one to expect from that? Pacific Overtures challenges expectations, traditions and conventions, turning them inside out and boiling them to yield new conventions that test and thrill our imaginations. Set in Japan 1853, the piece is as much about the evolution of cultural traditions as it is about the reevaluation of theatrical tradition. Pacific Overtures, through the intriguing combination of Broadway, Kabuki and Noh practices, gives its audience an opporutnity to develop new expectations about how theatre can move, question, interpret and motivate.