Frank Rich, reviewing the 1984 revival for "The New York Times" stated that "the show attempts an ironic marriage of Broadway and Oriental idioms in its staging, its storytelling techniques and, most of all, in its haunting Stephen Sondheim songs. It's a shotgun marriage, to be sure - with results that are variously sophisticated and simplistic, beautiful and vulgar. But if "Pacific Overtures" is never going to be anyone's favorite Sondheim musical, it is a far more forceful and enjoyable evening at the Promenade than it was eight years ago at the Winter Garden...Many of the songs are brilliant, self-contained playlets. In "Four Black Dragons" various peasants describe the arrival of the American ships with escalating panic, until finally the nightmarish event does seem to be, as claimed, "the end of the world."..."Someone in a Tree," is a compact "Rashomon" - and as fine as anything Mr. Sondheim has written...The single Act II triumph, "Bowler Hat," could well be a V. S. Naipaul tale set to music and illustrated with spare Japanese brushstrokes..."Bowler Hat" delivers the point of "Pacific Overtures" so artfully that the rest of Act II seems superfluous."