Category Archives: Japan

Kabuki: Bancho Sarayashiki, Kurozuka (番町皿屋敷, 黒塚 )

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  • Kabuki: 番町皿屋敷, 女暫、黒塚 (Bancho Sarayashiki, Onna Shibaraku, Kurozuka)

1/16/15 (Fri), Tokyo

Bancho Sarayashiki is based on a famous ghost story where the evil samurai Aoyama Harima, having been rejected by his young servant Okiku, tricks her into thinking that she has lost one of the family’s ten valuable Korean dishes, a capital crime. She frantically counts over and over, but only finds nine. He then murders her and throws her down a well. She comes back as a ghost to haunt him, always counting up to nine and then shrieking. That story was evidently adapted into Bunraku puppet theater, where the cruelty factor was upped considerably, and that version was then turned into a short-lived Kabuki piece.

The version this month, though, is a New Kabuki adaptation by Okamoto Kido in 1916, which takes a significantly different approach to the ghost story – for one thing, it has no ghosts. Continue reading →

On The Town (オン・ザ・タウン)

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オン・ザ・タウン (On The Town)

9/28/14 (Sun), Tokyo

At long last, On The Town reached Japan. It featured three pop stars from the super-popular music group V6 (managed by the legendary Johnny’s Office), which was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the show’s success was ensured from the minute it was announced: apparently, getting three of these guys together for this period of time is a near miracle given their sundry activities individually and as a group, and the show was sold out for the entire run before it even opened. So commercially this was a gold mine. On the other hand, this was clearly a Johnny’s crowd, with an audience that was 95% young and female. I haven’t seen such a female-heavy auditorium since Takarazuka. There was no room whatsoever for fans of Broadway musicals who may have wanted to see this Bernstein classic for the first time. It didn’t matter to this audience what they were seeing as long as their idols were there. So it pretty much establishes this show as a star vehicle, a very different approach from the US. Whether it will enter the repertory, and whether anyone would risk doing it now with normal musical actors, is an open question. Continue reading →

Noh: Tsunemasa (経政)

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Noh: 経政 (Tsunemasa)

9/14/14 (Sun), Karasumori Hachiman Shrine

This was an evening show being performed at a neighborhood shrine as part of an annual festival. I had hoped for candlelight rather than artificial lighting, especially since it’s called for in this case in the script itself, but I guess fire laws (and common sense on a wooden stage) prevailed.  Continue reading →

Curious Incident… (夜中の犬に起こった奇妙な事件)

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夜中の犬に起こった奇妙な事件 (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night)

4/19/14 (Sat), Tokyo

I had seen the London production last year (just a few weeks before the roof came crashing down during a performance) and was interested in seeing how the Japanese would approach the piece, especially in this much smaller space. Tickets were hard to come by because of the star, Morita Go, the idol singer who was so good in Kinkakuji a few years back.

The production was absolutely superb, making an equally compelling case for the material as in London. One excellent touch was the shift of the action from England to Japan – Christopher became Yukito, the trip from Swindon-London was Shizuoka-Tokyo, A-level exams became some sort of equivalent Japanese test and so on. The material was adapted so deftly that it didn’t feel at all like a foreign work, and it allowed the actors to behave normally instead of contorting themselves kabuki-like into their image of a Westerner. This approach is done at times for the classics, especially Shakespeare, but not enough for contemporary works. I hope this becomes a trend. Continue reading →

Take Me Out (テイク・ミー・アウト)

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テイクミーアウト（Take Me Out)

12/14/16 (Wed), Tokyo

A Japanese-language production of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 drama about a baseball player who comes out as gay and the consequences of that action. Continue reading →

Noh: Mochizuki (望月)

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Noh: 望月 (Mochizuki)

11/20/16 (Sun), Tokyo

Mochizuki belongs to a class of Noh works that actors aren’t allowed to do until they are deemed ready by their elders. As such, the lead’s performance was a big honor for him. In a lecture on the show a week earlier, he noted that the story was basically scratched out some centuries ago to give young performers a chance to do the popular lion dance from an even-higher ranking show called Shakkyo. Here it’s presented as a show within a show, so technically doesn’t violate the hierarchy keeping the unworthy actors from the lions, a very Japanese compromise — though the fact that this show is now itself a ranked show is ironic.  Continue reading →

Humanity and Paper Balloons (人情紙風船)

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人情紙風船 (Humanity and Paper Balloons)

4/26/14 (Sat)

A much acclaimed film from 1937. It’s the last of only three surviving works from director Yamanaka Sadao, who was evidently drafted into the army the day the film was released and died soon thereafter in Manchuria. I was interested in it mainly because it draws from the Kabuki play Shinza the Barber, which I saw earlier this month. (That was in turn based on the Bunraku play 恋娘昔八丈 that I saw late last year.) It had a string of Nakamuras and Ichikawas in the cast, which sounded suspiciously Kabuki-like, and it turns out that they were disaffected young Kabuki actors who had formed their own left-wing troupe, the Zenshinza, to pursue a more naturalistic acting style. I had assumed the movie would be a standard period piece, but that turned out to be not quite the case. Continue reading →