• メンフィス (Memphis)

12/12/17 (Mon), 新国立劇場

An original Japanese production of the hit Broadway musical from some years back. A white music lover in Memphis in the 1950s overcomes prejudice by persuading (1) a white record store to play black music in the shops, (2) a white radio station to play black music on the air, (3) a black singer to become his girlfriend, (4) his suspicious mother and the girl’s suspicious brother to accept his relationship with the girl, and so on and so forth. He fails to convince TV executives to accept mixed-race shows and ultimately loses the girl to reality, ending his days as DJ at a second-rate Memphis radio station while she goes on to New York and stardom. But never fear: it all comes to an upbeat ending that sends everyone out dancing. The maudlin plot was impeccably PC and nothing new, even for Japanese audiences, but it offers a harmless framework for some energetic singing and dancing against a nice pastiche of 1950s R&B.

The impressive physical production, directed and choreographed here by Jeffrey Page, was on a Broadway scale in every way. I was curious as to how the director, a black American, was going to convey the difference between whites and blacks in the nearly all-Japanese cast (the sole exception being Jero, a popular black American singer with part-Japanese ancestry and a perfect command of the language). His elegant solution was to dress the whites in light-colored clothing and the blacks in more colorful or darker clothing, which, along with some tasteful makeup, worked beautifully. His direction was fluid and splashy, with no expense spared on the set or lighting. (The costly staging apparently made the production impossible to transfer to other cities after its mere month-long Tokyo run, a waste given the near-capacity crowds.) The music was amplified to the hilt, obscuring a lot of the lyrics and making it impossible to know whether they were really singing or lip synching – a big contrast with the immaculate sound system in Hamilton in LA last week. Japanese ears deserve better.

The choreography was varied and notably well danced by the cast; this is one area where Japanese musical theater has made marked progress in recent years. The acting was as usual a different story, but the show did benefit from strong performances by both leads, Yamamoto Koji in a quirkily nervous portrayal as the white guy and Hamada Megumi’s more natural approach as the black singer. Jero offered solid support as the girl’s protective brother, including unexpectedly good dancing for someone known primarily as a singer of Japanese enka folk songs. Audiences get their money’s worth in an excellent production.