9/22/18 (Mon), Tokyo
A full-scale production of Follies is always an event given the huge cast, glamorous setting and the show’s complexity, and the National Theatre production had been widely praised. It also featured one of my favorite British stage actresses, Imelda Staunton, so I wasn’t going to miss it. But the pleasures of the production need to be separated from the dreariness of what’s on stage. A bit of background.
Boys in the Band → Angels in America → The Inheritance
10/16/18 (Tues)
I’m glad to see that The Inheritance has moved deservedly from the Young Vic to an open-ended West End run, winning rave reviews in the process. It’s especially interesting to look back on this play in the context of two other powerhouse NY-based gay-themed shows that have been revived in NY and London in recent months, Boys in the Band and Angels in America.
9/29/18 (Sat)
I hadn’t seen this 1952 classic in years, but with Miyamoto Amon’s Broadway-aimed musical version set to debut (in Japanese) next week, I figured it was time for a revisit. It didn’t strike me as an obvious choice for musicalization given the halting communication skills of the main character, who is not exactly Mr. Excitement, and I wondered how they could top the haunting “Gondola no Uta” that the man sings on the swing in the iconic finale. First, a look at the film.
9/9/18 (Sun), National Noh Theatre
I hadn’t seen any of these, the first two being rarities and the last a non-standard version of the well-known Shojo. The themes today seemed to be autumn and alcohol.
9/15/18 (Sat), Tokyo
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, and the National Theatre is featuring two productions from that era. After an astounding period of creativity, Bunraku had pretty much halted as a living art in the 18th century, and not many pieces were being written at this point. Whereas the Kabuki world was undertaking some dramatic experiments incorporating Western concepts, these puppet pieces stay safely within the bounds of their predecessors — which is fine when done as well as it is here. Continue reading
9/12/18 (Wed), Tokyo Kabukiza
All the shows in this month’s evening performance were pieces derived from ancient Noh theater: Sanbaso, a comic take on the austere Okina; the great Shunkan, Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s brash reworking of the old drama; and a new dance piece by National Living Treasure Tamasaburo based on the classics Hagoromo, Shakkyo and Dojoji.
9/7/18 (Thurs)
A 1954 film by Heinosuke Gosho set in contemporary Osaka. Continue reading
9/8/18 (Sat)
An unforgiving 1961 satire of Japanese society by the ever-radical Nagisa Oshima based on a story by Oe Kenzaburo. Continue reading
8/20/18 (Mon), Tokyo
The full-length version of Tsuruya Nanboku’s popular piece. Continue reading
7/21/18 (Sat), New York
An overwrought stage version of the Visconti film by man-of-the-hour Ivo van Hove, the busy avant-garde Belgian director. He’s best known for his minimalist productions, as in the interesting View from the Bridge, but here he’s taken a sharp turn to maximalist.
The saga, which broadly follows the movie plot, revolves around a rich steel manufacturer who has chosen unwisely to deal with the Nazis just as they are coming to power. The intricate story involves betrayal, greed, murder, suicide, political brutality, incest and other pleasantries, only to result in the end in the loss of the family’s steel plants to Hitler’s regime as the nation marches inexorably toward war.
7/20/18 (Fri), New York Off Broadway
Oscar Hammerstein II completed this English-language version of Carmen, reset in a black community in wartime America, just before turning to the starkly different world of Carousel, which I saw on Broadway a few days earlier. Carmen feels almost like a musical in the first place (Carousel, for that matter, sometimes feels like opera), so it makes much more sense as a Broadway show than, say, the La Boheme staging some years back. Still, the vocal requirements for this show must be a killer for an eight-performance week, and other issues, not least some less-than-PC black dialect, make productions pretty rare – the last time I saw it was in London several decades ago. So I wasn’t going to miss this.
7/19/18 (Thurs), National Yiddish Theatre
A Fiddler in Yiddish – sounds crazy, no? This was a Yiddish version that played in Israel in 1965, just a year after the show debuted on Broadway, and has evidently not been seen since. I was going to take advantage of a rare Thursday matinee – the show doesn’t play on Fri nights or Sat matinees, for reasons obvious if you’re Jewish – but a friend happened to be going that night and had an extra ticket.
As it turns out, this was not just another Fiddler. The use of Yiddish, which would have been the language of the characters in real life, provided an unexpectedly fresh perspective on the familiar show. Continue reading
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