With the death of the great Takamine Hideko at year-end, I gathered friends to watch one of her most successful films. It is an unabashedly sentimental piece from 1953 about a new teacher and her 12 charges in a poor village in Shodoshima over a 20-year span from 1928-1948, i.e., before, during and after the war.
1/29/18 (Mon), Tokyo
British composer Thomas Adès’ new opera, based on the 1962 Buñuel film, was a big popular and critical success in Salzburg, London and New York, and I was eager to catch this Met Live production from last November. The source film, which I had somehow never seen, happened to be playing in Tokyo at a retrospective of Buñuel’s Mexican works, so I caught that the night before.
The story, a Beckett-like setup where fancy guests at a dinner party find themselves mysteriously unable to leave the room, didn’t seem a promising subject for a full opera. For one thing, it’s largely an ensemble piece with no real leads, less about individual characters than the breakdown of the social order and how people behave in extreme situations. The film wraps up in a brisk 90 minutes or so, suggesting that a one-act opera might be more appropriate. (That appears to be the approach that Stephen Sondheim and David Ives are taking in their musical version, which will combine this film with that other Buñuel dinner-party piece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.) The fact that this all takes place largely within the confines of a single room with the same costuming throughout also doesn’t suggest much in the way of scale or glamour. In any event, I was curious to see what Adès and his co-librettist Tom Cairns would make of this.
Ichikawa Kon’s 1958 film version of Mishima’s then-recent novel Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion), a fictionalization of the notorious incident just a few years earlier when a crazed monk burned down the centuries-old structure. The novel is filled with ruminations about the nature of beauty versus reality by a narrator isolated from society by his own insecurities over his crippling stutter. His image of Kinkakuji (called here by a different name), described by his father as almost other-worldly, sets him up for a devastating letdown when he encounters the actual dilapidated structure. The temple in his mind represents an ideal that, when violated, prompts him to destroy the former to protect the latter.
The film can’t begin to compete at that level, but it is a dutiful recounting of the main events and is highly effective on its own terms. Continue reading
Steven Spielberg’s intended film remake of West Side Story is apparently a go, for better or worse. While the original 1957 stage show was a modest success, it was the smash 1961 film that put the musical on the map with the second-highest grosses of the year and ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The love was not shared by its creators, who did not approve of the numerous revisions in song order and such, and it has not aged particularly well, coming off today as rather stagy despite its on-location shooting. Still, it is an historic work with a perfect cast, that amazing score and the iconic Jerome Robbins choreography, making the challenge of a remake formidable. The innovative approaches of recent musical films like Sweeney Todd and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (as well as the NBC Live musicals) do suggest a new path for musical film, and a creative look at old material is always welcome. (The stage show itself could stand some polishing if the Robbins estate would ever allow it.)
So why am I skeptical? Let us count the ways. Continue reading
1/27/18 (Sat), Tokyo
The latest rendering of Mishima’s overwrought, exceedingly talky but highly popular detective drama of 1962. I saw the traditional shingeki version ten years ago with the sleek villainess played by the legendary Miwa Akihiro, Mishima’s own choice for the film version (and supposed lover), and came out unsure whether I was seeing a serious rendering or a parody. This time was a new production by the celebrated British director David Leveaux, who, less tied to the old ways, would presumably be coming to the material with fresh eyes. I was also encouraged by good reviews by friends. The production was completely sold out throughout the run, but I managed to grab two day seats.
4/16/17 (Sun), Umewaka Noh Theater, Tokyo
This was a nice pairing of shows since both, in a seasonal touch, were set in the cherry blossoms. They were also both explicitly religious and offered fast-paced kakeri (described somewhere as “anguish dances”).
I was particularly interested in Tamura since, unlike the typical laments by felled soldiers, it’s one of only three warrior pieces in Noh that are about winners. (I saw another, Yashima, just a few months earlier.) This play is also unusual among the warrior shows in that it is not about one of the 12th-century Heike battles but an event that comes several hundred years earlier. Continue reading
4/5/17 (Wed), Yasukuni Shrine
The cherry blossoms were in full glorious bloom for Yasukuni Shrine’s annual outdoor Noh series this year, so the setting was magnificent. Gensho, a National Living Treasure, had played the previous night in the wonderful Saigyozakura (西行桜), but I opted for tonight since it was a play I hadn’t seen. My friend was late, so I missed the torch lighting and had to watch the opening dance from the back. Grr.
The Noh piece, Youchi Soga, has an unusual pedigree. The author Miyamasu is a contemporary of the pioneering Zeami, but while the latter went all aristocratic once the shogun took him in, the former continued to write common man’s Noh – not a genre I was even aware of. His plays apparently are nearly all genzai plays featuring living people as opposed to ghosts, with actual plots and lots of characters. A good number are about the Soga brother vendetta that also features so prominently in Kabuki.
I had thought the subject of the electoral college had died out until the next presidential election in 2020, but this excellent Frontpage Mag article defending the system recently comes not too long after a New York Times editorial on November 7 that had taken precisely the opposite view, recommending that the electoral college be jettisoned and the presidential election held by pure popular vote. I had made my views clear around a year earlier in the wake of the November 2016 election and recycled those in a response to the Times editorial:
“In the EU, four countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy) have more than half the population of the 28-member bloc. There is no way that Belgium or Greece or Denmark, say, is going to allow the Big Four to have their way through a pure popular vote given the deep differences among the member nations.
“That’s how Alabama and North Dakota and Alaska feel about NY and California. Thirty states chose Trump vs. 20 for Clinton, for better or worse. I don’t see how Clinton could have claimed legitimacy in that case. The electoral college may need reform, but a popular vote in a continental-sized country makes no sense to me.”
That may have been too brief to get the point across, but it generated a large number of comments, some of them pretty outrageous. Continue reading
A recently released survey on the ethnic makeup of Broadway performers made for an interesting comparison with another survey this month on the composition of Broadway audiences. (The former survey examines the 2015-16 season and the latter 2016-17, but the trend is broadly the same.) The Asian American Performers Action Coalition found that minority actors accounted for 35% of all roles on Broadway in the 2015-16 season. The vast majority were blacks, who represented 23% of all roles, with Latinos at 7% and Asians at 4%. That is, blacks are significantly overrepresented on the Broadway stage given that they are 13.3% of the US population (July 2016 census estimate), while Latinos (17.8% of population) are significantly underrepresented and Asians (5.7%) more or less balanced.
The survey also notes that minorities account for 56% of the New York City population, raising the question: who the heck is the majority? In any event, as the other survey by the Broadway League shows, this is not the percentage you find in the theaters. A whopping 76.8% of Broadway audiences last season were white, well over both their New York numbers (where, as we have seen, they are a minority) and their 61.3% ratio of the US population. Asians are also overrepresented at 8.4%. In contrast, both Latinos and blacks are pitifully underrepresented at 7.1% and 3.4%, the latter only around one-quarter their ratio of the US population. That is, those last two categories together account for around 30% of the population and 30% of Broadway roles but only around 10% of Broadway viewers.
3/7/17 (Tues), Tokyo
Amon Miyamoto, who brought his maverick (and Tony-nominated) production of Pacific Overtures to Broadway some years back, is the go-to director for Sondheim musicals in Japan, but I was still surprised to hear that he was tackling this pure farce versus the more pseudo-serious shows that he prefers. It made more sense once I realized that he’s given it a twist: he’s changed the setting from ancient Rome to Edo, the name for present-day Tokyo through the mid-19th century. This is the first time I know of that Sondheim has permitted a fundamental change like this in any of his shows throughout his long career. (I understand that he’s also given the okay for a Company in the UK using a female lead.) Maybe he’s getting more mellow in his old age. I had assumed that this was one of Miyamoto’s wacky ideas but was surprised to learn that it came from Sondheim himself (a friend of Miyamoto’s since happening upon Pacific in Tokyo in 2000) at the suggestion of Japanese writer Aoshika Koji, who translated the script alongside Miyamoto’s lyrics.
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. Continue reading
12/8/17 (Fri), 歌舞伎座
The first piece, Memories of Mother (the best of the numerous English titles of this show), is Hasegawa Shin’s semi-autobiographical Shin (New) Kabuki from 1931 about a man in search of his mother. Continue reading
sekenbanashi 