Blackbird Theater's current production,
Pacific Overtures, is the official kickoff event for Nashville's 2012 Sakura season, the observance period of Japanese culture and heritage ending with Nashville’s Cherry Blossom Festival.
Pacific Overtures tells the story of Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 mission to open trade relations with isolationist Japan through gunboat diplomacy. This innovative show by Sondheim and Weidman blends the American musical form with elements from kabuki theater, to present the origin of relations between America and Japan through the eyes of the Japanese.
Pacific Overtures runs weekends in February in Shamblin Theater on the Lipscomb University Campus in Nashville. For more information, visit
http://blackbirdnashville.com/.
Here is my interview with Blackbird Theatre co-founder Greg Greene:
How did you choose Pacific Overtures as Blackbird's current theatrical production?
We fell in love with Pacific Overtures in the mid-90s listening to the original Broadway cast recording from 1976. It’s beautiful and exotic – a mix of traditional Japanese theater and American Broadway musical. And Sondheim’s lyrics are peerless. It was over 10 years before either of us saw a staged production, but we found that both the score and the story are gripping. This show is rarely produced – strange considering it’s a Sondheim show and one of such quality – and in fact Nashville has the only production of Pacific Overtures anywhere in the world in 2012.
When you chose this production were you aware of the Nashville Cherry Blossom festival event or did this partnership come later?We decided to pursue a staging of Pacific Overtures after we closed Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia last February. I took one of my kids to the Cherry Blossom Festival a few weeks later, where I met staff from the
Consulate-General of Japan in Nashville. We opened up a conversation on tying in Blackbird’s production with the 2012
Sakura Season (the observance period of Japanese culture & heritage ending with the Cherry Blossom Festival). 2012 is the centennial of Japan’s gift of the
cherry blossom trees to Washington DC – the trees are a symbol of friendship between our nations – and the Consulate-General was very supportive of making Pacific Overtures the official kickoff of Sakura Season. They’ve been a pleasure to work with.
Blackbird’s production of Pacific Overtures shines a spotlight on the longtime presence and investment of the Japanese in Tennessee. The presence of Japanese-owned mega-corporations like Bridgestone and Nissan has a profound impact on Tennessee’s economy, as well as the 120 smaller businesses that supply parts to the auto industry.
How did you and Wes Driver form this production company together?
Wes and I have been close friends and collaborators since we were undergrads at Lipscomb University in the early 90s. A few years ago, we got serious about making a mark in Nashville’s theater scene and started shopping around our original scripts to different theater companies. Everyone was encouraging, but no one was willing to take a risk on unknown writers with an unknown script. Finally, we approached Mike Fernandez, the new chair of Lipscomb’s theater department, about possibly getting the university’s support of a large-scale musical we were developing. Mike was immediately interested, and asked us to form a professional theater company and serve as artists-in-residence at Lipscomb. It’s been an ideal opportunity – Lipscomb’s theater faculty and students have provided much of the effort necessary to mount productions, and working side-by-side with some of Nashville’s most talented actors has been a good experience for the students. Wes and I feel very blessed by the acclaim our first three productions have received.
How do you manage full time careers and a production company?
Wes and I are both family guys. Managing day jobs and a theater company while raising young children is an enormous challenge, especially when ramping up for a show. My wife Chelle home-schools, so we have the advantage of setting our schedule. My kids are usually awake when I get home at (gulp) 11:00pm or later, so I can see them and put them to bed. My kids – 9-year old triplets – are old enough to understand what it means to pursue one’s dream, and they’ve been very supportive. Blackbird belongs to our kids as much as to Wes and me.
What visions/dreams/goals do you have for Blackbird Theatre?On our bucket list is the dream of mounting a full production of our original musical Myth. We did a staged reading/singing of Myth in November. We’ve worked on this musical for years with our good friend and composer Michael Slayton (who stars as Kayama in Pacific Overtures). I’d love to see Nashville get behind the show and help realize it on stage – to make it the musical Nashville created. In the meantime, we’ll keep working to bring rarely produced shows with big ideas to Middle Tennessee.
Well, I've discovered the fountain of youth-ful clothing without the humiliation (and expense) of mall shopping! It's Plato's Closet, a national chain of resell shops that buys gently worn name-brand clothing geared toward teens/twenties! Okay, so it's not a new discovery, but, a teenage friend of mine recently started her first job there and encouraged me to give it a try. She promised me there'd be no thought-bubbles redirecting me to the Fashion Bug next door. 
I also realized I'm old enough to be the mother of a junior-sized daughter, [¡Ay, caramba!] so, I could always pretend I was shopping for my imaginary daughter. But, in actuality, I felt no shame or humiliation. And, as a frugal thirty-something, I'm quite comfortable wearing last-season's cast-offs, so the field was ripe unto harvest.
Oh ... and one final bonus: No half-naked-child-models plastered on posters or shopping bags! Plato, I'll be shopping your closet again soon. 
Brayden took these photos while we were on that walk. His natural sense of artistic composition thrills me. His tender heart delights me. And I am confident that his grandmother's sense of adventure, her love of nature, and her championing of the underdog will live on in her oldest grandson. 
