Lightning doesn’t strike twice, at least not right away. A few brisk months ago, here we were, at Studio 54, watching the Roundabout revive a little-regarded Stephen Sondheim musical. “Assassins” proved to be a sensation, riveting and disturbing, a triumph all around. It was extended for a time, then abruptly closed. I’m still working out some undirected rage about that.

The new arrival at Studio 54, “Pacific Overtures,” is another extracanonical Stephen Sondheim musical with a book by John Weidman and a politico historical bent. A century and a half ago (the show tells us), Commodore Matthew Perry opened quiet, peaceable Japan to grubby-fingered Western traders. In “Please Hello,” the shogun is wooed and bullied by representatives of five nations. They stick one end of their flags to him and circle him waving the other: Busby Berkeley, meet Dr. Kissinger.

If you’re the type who braves the Lincoln Center Festival, this may sound familiar. Two summers ago, director Amon Miyamoto imported his production of “Pacific Overtures” from the New National Theater of Tokyo. It was trippy: Japanese actors performing an American musical about Japanese-American affairs told from the Japanese point of view, in Japanese, for Americans.

But fear not, Broadway: Your food has been chewed for you. At Studio 54, Mr. Miyamoto’s production is performed in English, by Americans. Shorn of that keen anthropological interest, all that remains is Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Weidman’s canny, wayward musical, and Mr. Miyamoto’s uneven realization of it.

The authors had a big and noble idea when they wrote this show for Harold Prince in 1976.So big and noble, in fact, they never managed to wrestle it into shape. The story would be told from Japan’s point of view. Fine. But would it concentrate on individual experiences, or society as a whole? The common folk or the palace types? Comedy or tragedy, in Eastern style or Western?

The result tries a little of everything. Guided by the Reciter (the engaging B.D. Wong), the show meanders from pre-encounter Japan to open-door thrills, then zooms forward to the present day. It gets some things right, profoundly right, especially now. The Americans are dismissed as “barbarians” and “foreign devils.” They stomp down the aisles with guns and nightmarish curls. Perry himself stands about 8 feet tall, in a star-spangled Howard Stern ‘do. A huge U.S. flag unfurls over the entire audience, and Brian MacDevitt and Dan Moses Schreier punctuate with explosive light and sound, the Sturm und Drang of heavy ordnance. It’s painfully timely.

Alas the writers stick their director with a deadly dull start, an early suicide that borders on farce, and a late collision between two old friends that’s supposed to Mean Something. Maybe it would, if the show’s attention hadn’t wandered elsewhere for the preceding hour or so. (Salman Rushdie got this right in “The Satanic Verses.”) Scenic designer Rumi Matsui surrounds the stage with water, a nice visual metaphor. Otherwise the production tends to let its golden opportunities slip by.

Most numbers aren’t notably well sung, and the pace often flags. The gravest disappointment is when the dark comedy doesn’t come off in “Chrysanthemum Tea.” The song is a sour masterpiece, fully worthy of the author of “Sweeney Todd.” The plodding, banal “Someone in a Tree” is another story. I seem to be a minority of one on this count, but the long applause at its finish confirms its place as the most overrated song in the Sondheim catalog.

The ultimate hope for Mr. Miyamoto’s production is that it can fuse East and West. Here and there you’ll spot some deft mask work and puppetry, but the gestural stuff looks mannered. The show’s unity of styles looked a lot more convincing at Lincoln Center. And before you rush to blame American actors, remember that Chen Shi-Zheng notched one of the outstanding musical events in recent memory when he staged a hybrid version of a Chinese folk opera, “The Orphan of Zhao,” with a Yankee cast.

Longer than the Meiji Empire but not nearly as much fun, “Pacific Overtures” mostly shows how wise intentions can lead to murky results. More than once the show recalls David Henry Hwang’s botched recent rewrite of “Flower Drum Song.” Though in the last number, Mr. Miyamoto’s jerky choreography brings to mind another epochal encounter, when Devo first landed on MTV.

***

If it’s laughs and a tug on the heartstrings you’re after, Eugene Ionesco probably isn’t your guy. A pleasant surprise awaits at the BAM Harvey, where the absurdist king’s “The Chairs” gets a fond and compelling revival.

The short play, about an ancient couple who invite dozens of guests to their island home, stars David Gordon and Valda Setterfield. Dancers of long and glowing repute, they are married in real life, and of a certain age. The show teases us with autobiography.

The evening begins with a video, clips of them performing Mr. Gordon’s choreography for “Chair,” a 1974 piece exploring every permutation of the human relationship to a folding chair. Away goes the screen, and on come the performers themselves, in the flesh. Age and distance: Already the show strikes a poignant note.

Mr. Gordon calls her Cookie, Ms. Setterfield calls him Pussycat. He is petulant and babyish; in a halo of cornsilk curls, she is sensible and mothering. When the guests arrive, and he frets about the message he wishes to impart, he sounds a little like Zero Mostel. The joke, of course, is that there are no guests. The black folding chairs that pile up onstage (dull and shiny, like a horde of beetles) remain dispiritingly empty. At the end, the couple will step off into oblivion, and the message will remain undelivered.

But first the show will abound in song and dance. As director, choreographer, and editor (whatever that means), Mr. Gordon has hit upon a way to mount an authentically American vision of this befuddling play. Michael Feingold’s lively adaptation finds the right comic rhythms, as when Mr. Gordon encounters a guest with “a long and puffy nose.” Michael Gordon’s score, both recorded and played live on the cello, skips from warm nostalgia to insistent menace.

The production adopts an excess flourish here and there, like placards spelling out bits of dialogue. And some of the guests aren’t treated with the same concision as the rest. But Mr. Gordon and Ms. Setterfield, with their grace and long experience, find the deep melancholy in the text. Don’t say they were born to play these roles – they lived to play them.

“Pacific Overtures” until January 30 (254 W. 54th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-719-1300).

“The Chairs” until December 4 (651 Fulton Street, between Ashland and Rockwell Place, 718-636-4100).