11/4/17 (Sat)
The prolific stage/film writer Mitani Koki has his good days [The Last Laugh (笑いの大学), Twelve Gentle Japanese (12人の優しい日本人)] and bad (most of his output), and this 1997 film, based on his 1993 stage show, is one of the latter. Continue reading
10/17/17 (Tues), Tokyo Kabukiza
The Cuckoo, the Solitary Castle and the Sinking Moon is a piece in the modern Shin Kabuki (New Kabuki) genre by the 20th-century playwright Tsubouchi Shoyo surrounding the historic destruction of Osaka Castle in 1615. Hideyori was supposed to have inherited the mantle of leader after his father’s death but was outwitted by the wily Ieyasu, who is now moving in for the coup de grâce. With the enemy outside the gates, Hideyori’s family and forces debate whether to go down with dignity or run for their lives. The one ace they have is Ieyasu’s granddaughter Princess Sen, who is in a political marriage with Hideyori. They hope that her presence will help waylay an outright massacre by her grandfather. Ieyasu has sent a spy to kidnap her back, but she is being watched vigilantly by Hideyori’s suspicious mother Yodo. The drama concentrates on the emotional toll that the pressure takes on the characters in the besieged castle, most notably a descent by the frantic mother into madness.
10/15/17 (Sun), Tokyo
Morihisa is a relative rarity that, while long on talk and short on action, proved an intriguing piece. Continue reading
10/12/17 (Thurs)
Double Suicide (1969) is Masahiro Shinoda’s highly stylized take on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 18th-century Bunraku (puppet theater) masterpiece The Love Suicides at Amijima. Chikamatsu does not emerge from this well.
10/1/17 (Sun), New National Theatre, Tokyo
The eclectic puppeteer Taira Jo is back with a series of three adult-oriented shows performed over three days. All the dramas highlight women, making for a theme of sorts, though that’s the only thing in common among them. Yesterday was Medea, a revival of the excellent production I saw some years back, and tomorrow is a piece by the aggressively avant-garde Terayama Shuji. Today’s sounded like a safer bet. This story was originally a 1974 play, which was novelized the following year and made into a film by Shinoda Masahiro in 1977 under the name “Ballad of Orin”, which I have not seen. Taira again played all the roles, helped by three hooded kurogo stagehands.
9/15/15 (Tues), Kabukiza
Hade Kurabe Ise Monogatari (A Colorful Rivalry: Tales of Ise) is another convoluted but entertaining piece by Nagawa Kamesuke, the same guy who wrote the classic Meiboku Sendai Hagi (which is playing in the afternoon). The program noted that this is the 1,200th anniversary of the birth of one of the show’s main characters, Ki no Aritsune.
8/8/15 (Sat), Tokyo
I had heard good things about this production of Aladdin, which is completely sold out for nearly a year in advance. I’m always wary of the Gekidan Shiki group because of its Kabuki-like acting style, but as a fan of the movie and still not having seen the show on Broadway, I accepted quickly when a friend came up with a last-minute ticket. His tickets came apparently from a fan from Shizuoka who is seeing this for her seventh time and had two extra seats. I was surprised at the relative lack of children in the audience, but I suppose normal families have no chance against the many rabid Shiki fans like her who are willing to travel an hour and a half on the Shinkansen dozens of times to see the same show. A sad fact for theater fans, but Disney (whose The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid are also successfully managed in Japan by Shiki) must be laughing all the way to the bank.
7/24/15 (Fri), Tokyo
A performance of Japanese taiko drums dressed up in a dramatic frame. Drum Tao is a group of young well-built drummers and athletes from Oita Prefecture in Kyushu that has apparently been around a while – the program (unusually distributed free) says they’ve performed in 400 cities in 20 countries. But they were new to me.
6/24/15 (Wed)
I wasn’t wild about the idea of a Kitano (“Beat”) Takeshi film given its reputation for over-the-top violence, but Hana-Bi is one of several flicks by him – “by” in a big sense, meaning directed, written and starring – that are widely considered modern classics, especially overseas. So I figured it was about time to check it out. Continue reading
5/19/15 (Tues), Tokyo
These were silent films by Torajiro Saito, evidently known in his day as film studio Shochiku’s “king of comedy”. They were narrated by a female benshi, Akiko Sasaki, who sat at the side of the screen and voiced all the roles as well as narrating non-dialogue sections in her own words. The music was newly composed and played live on a keyboard. The setup directly recalled (and perhaps stemmed from) Japan’s Bunraku puppet theater, where the narrator and musician sit in full view of the audience on a raised platform beside the stage and give voice to the voiceless puppets. The mixture of film and live performance seemed very modern somehow, so it’s interesting to note that Japan was doing it nearly a century ago. Continue reading
8/13/17 (Sun), Tokyo
This was a second crack at modernized Bunraku by the renowned photographer and artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. The first, which I saw almost exactly six years ago, was a fuller-than-usual version of the ever-popular Love Suicide at Sonezaki. That show incorporated scenes that hadn’t been performed in centuries, juggled the usual placement of singers and musicians on stage, and experimented with lighting and (naturally) photographic and video projections, among other innovations. Unfortunately, it fell victim to a hall far too large for a puppet drama, chosen presumably to pay for all that elaborate staging; Sugimoto’s many fans got their money’s worth, but Bunraku fans were left short changed. Still, the staid world of Bunraku can stand some shaking up, and the production had some worthwhile ideas. So I was looking forward to what he would do this time, especially in this smaller, more puppet-friendly theater. He chose another of Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s big hits, which centers on the brutal murder of a young woman by a heavily indebted youth.
A look back: Pacific Overtures in Tokyo (太平洋序曲)
(I discovered that an article I wrote back in 2001 for the Sondheim Review (scroll down) is still available online, so I decided to link to it here. I discuss the innovative Tokyo production of the Japan-themed Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures, which later moved to Broadway in both Japanese and English versions. The latter was doomed by a poor choice of venue, though it did win a Tony nomination for Best Revival. Here are my thoughts on its Tokyo debut.
(UPDATE: An expanded version of this essay will be included in the Oxford Handbook of the Global Stage Musical, due out in November 2023.)
The idea of a Tokyo production of Pacific Overtures has something of a Victor/Victoria quality about it: a Japanese production of an American musical about the Japanese reaction to the arrival of Americans in Japan.
This is not quite like bringing a Japanese “Pearl Harbor Memories” to Honolulu, but it is true that the momentous changes that Commodore Perry’s arrival helped foment, a quaint story for Americans, are a vital part of the Japanese national identity. Indeed, many of the events and characters portrayed in the show – Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the world, Manjiro, the Tokugawa shogunate, the Meiji revolution and its consequences – are as familiar to any Japanese schoolchild as George Washington and the Revolutionary War are to Americans.
Even so, this is different from Americans enjoying a production of 1776. Because the show was written by Americans for American audiences, the different perspective makes a Japanese production a challenge in some unexpected ways. In October [2001], in a production directed by Amon Miyamoto, Pacific Overtures was given its Japanese premiere at The Pit, a 342-seat space in Tokyo’s New National Theatre.
It was an unquestioned critical and popular triumph for Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, who attended the final performances, as well as the Japanese creative staff.
Moreover, it certainly shed new light on the show. Watching “Someone In A Tree,” the first-act song about varying perspectives, I had a sudden image of Harold Prince in a tree and Miyamoto under the floorboards, both looking at the script. In any event, judging from the video of the original Broadway production and the text (used in Tokyo) of the off-Broadway version, I can say that the Japanese show is a radical rethink.
sekenbanashi 