Category Archives: Musical

Moulin Rouge (ムーランルージュ)

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  • ムーランルージュ (Moulin Rouge) 

8/12/23 (Sat), Tokyo

The two-month run was completely sold out well in advance of the opening. I was curious about the show because of the unusual use of music – not the original songs but the brief clips from well-known numbers that sprang up so often throughout the show. Those range from “Nature Boy” and “The Sound of Music” to “Lady Marmalade” and “Material Girl”, encompassing standards, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Queen and more, and I’m sure there were more up-to-date numbers that I simply didn’t recognize. Some were just a few seconds long, quoting a line or two, while others, most notably Elton John’s “Your Song”, were quoted extensively.

I was wondering if the older numbers would even be familiar to Japanese audiences, especially in the age group that they’re catering to. Because the songs are crucial to the action, they have all been translated into Japanese. As with Mamma Mia, the songs are fun to hear in a different context, but that assumes a knowledge of them in the first place; we know instantly what the song is referring to and thus respond to that memory, since the songs are rarely played in full. Translating them also takes the fun out of it. That said, Mamma Mia has been hugely popular here as everywhere, so what do I know?

The show, it turns out, is tremendous fun. Continue reading →

A Look Back: La Cage Aux Folles (musical)

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  • A Look Back: La Cage Aux Folles (musical)

With the opening of the UK’s latest revival of La Cage Aux Folles at the wonderful Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, I figured it was a good time to rerun my modest rewrite. The musical is great fun, but I’ve always been bothered by its preachiness. It shakes a virtual finger to lecture us (rather than subtly lead us) to love gays and hate bigots and so forth. As I noted, the fact that the message seems so obvious “is partly a function of the changing times, a trend that the musical itself helped bring about”. But the show is looking more like a period piece than the pure farce intended in the French play and film. The French are clearly much more relaxed about sexual matters like this – the original work dates from the 1970s, when openly gay-themed shows in English were pretty rare – and their approach was more cunning in underlining the couple’s basic humanity. Continue reading →

Camelot (2023 revival)

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  • Camelot 

4/2/23 (Sun), Lincoln Center

The magic is gone from this musical in more ways than one. Still in previews, it’s selling robustly on the strength of Bartlett Sher’s reputation with his past Lincoln Center productions, including an awesome South Pacific and The King & I and a woke (but popular) version of Lerner and Loewe’s previous show My Fair Lady. These productions offered gorgeous costumes and scenery, full orchestras with lush arrangements, and top-class performers. I was discouraged at first after reading an interview with the Lancelot, who boasted that the show included actors who are blind and use prosthetics so as to better represent America. See what’s missing there? How about talent? In any event, curiosity got the better of me, and I managed to get an excellent non-premium ticket (center orchestra!) an hour before showtime.

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Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles

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  • Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles

4/8/22 (Sat)

This disappointing 2019 documentary explores the origins and influence of Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 work that is one of the crowning achievements of the musical stage. Fiddler, at one point the longest-running show in Broadway history, is nominally about the life of a poor Jewish milkman and his family in a Ukrainian shtetl in the early 20th century, but on a wider level it portrays a community struggling to maintain its identity in a changing world. That universal theme has made the show extraordinarily popular worldwide; it has been a tremendous success for decades here in Japan, which staged one of the first of many foreign (and foreign-language) productions. However, the documentary has other ideas, as suggested in its Wikipedia summary: “Scholars examine the play’s themes of xenophobia, gender equality, civil rights, and religion.” Therein lies the problem.

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Pacific Overtures (太平洋序曲, UK-Japan co-production)

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  • 太平洋序曲 (Pacific Overtures), 3/12/23 (Sun), Tokyo

Pacific Overtures

British director Matthew White doesn’t let the script get in the way of his vision in his Japanese-language version of Pacific Overtures, a co-production between London’s Menier Chocolate Factory and Osaka’s Umeda Arts Theater that debuted in Tokyo a few days ago. He makes his ideas clear in his statement on the show’s website: “At a time when my own country, through Brexit, has opted to isolate itself from its European neighbors, I find it both fascinating and enlightening to investigate a period in recent history when Japan came to the opposite conclusion – that the only sensible option was to engage with the rest of the world to embrace new technologies and to demonstrate that anything the West could do, Japan could do better.”

He doesn’t note that Japan’s decision was forced upon it by the overt threat of military force from the Western powers, resulting in civil war, a wholesale upheaval of society, and the rise of a military regime that led the nation ultimately to disaster. The show’s original ending features a touching twinge of regret for a lost innocence, questioning whether the nation’s choices have been all for the good. The only other Tokyo production of this show some two decades ago, helmed by a Japanese director, enhanced that with a scene alluding to the nation’s unhappy experience in WWII to highlight the high price it has paid for its actions. That’s without mentioning that Japan has managed to engage with the world even with its Westernized ways without compromising its independence. The show seems a strange place to preach the evils of Brexit.

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Cabaret (film)

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  • Cabaret, 1/22/23 (Sun)

I hadn’t seen this film since it came out in 1972 and vaguely remember loving it. So when it showed up this month as part of a local theater’s morning classic film series, I jumped at the chance to catch it again on the big screen. It was much talked-about in its day for taking on themes like sexual liberation, anti-Semitism, homosexuality, abortion, and societal complacency in the face of evil, all in a musical format. It’s not the first musical to feature Nazis – The Sound of Music beat them to that. But that was a story of resistance to an established regime, whereas Cabaret examines how society got that way in the first place. The theater was impressively full for a movie over half-a-century old.

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Flower Drum Song (film)

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  • Flower Drum Song, 1/20/23 (Fri)

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s mini-hit musical must have seemed old-fashioned even in its day (1958) given the quality of shows playing elsewhere on Broadway at that time, which included My Fair Lady, West Side Story and Gypsy. It pursues the well-trod theme of a generation clash between immigrants and their native children, i.e., tradition vs. assimilation, but this time in a Chinese-American context. The characters could easily be Italian, Jewish or Irish, but the Asian theme provides new visual and musical possibilities that must have attracted the creators, who already had two huge Asia-related hits under their belt.

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American Utopia (film)

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  • American Utopia (film)

11/5/22 (Sat)

I didn’t know much about David Byrne, but several friends had raved about the Broadway run that was caught on film by no less than Spike Lee – a curious combination. This is basically a concert by a more-or-less expressionless Byrne accompanied by nine musicians and two dancers (a dynamic black woman and a campy redheaded man whose garish lipstick was the brightest thing on stage). Byrne was front and center in numerous spoken soliloquies and all musical numbers, though he allowed all performers to have a moment in the spotlight. He’s not the smoothest mover – I now have an idea of what I must look like on a dance floor – but has great stage presence. Byrne gave the glorified concert a theme of sorts in his initial speech: holding a model of a brain in hand, he pointed out that we lose connections within our brain as we age and expressed hope over the course of the show that we can connect again. Apparently the song list was a mix of the familiar and obscure, though most of his big hits are said to have made the cut. The audience was reportedly older, not a surprise given his age (upper 60s at the time), the nostalgia factor for viewers, and Broadway’s typically outlandish ticket prices.

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Hairspray (ヘアスプレー)

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  • ヘアスプレー (Hairspray)

10/1/22 (Sat)

I figured this show would be impossible to stage in Japan since it has a female lead, which by itself makes most musicals a losing proposition here, and one at that who can sing, dance and dominate the show. What I didn’t count on was Watanabe Naomi, a highly likeable plus-sized comedienne who made her mark imitating dancing stars like Beyoncé. She is the only face on the poster for the show – the first time I can ever remember that for a big musical, which would usually put as many faces on the poster as possible whether relevant or not in order to sell even one extra ticket to the performers’ fans. So a lot was riding on her shoulders. This is her first stage show, meaning she’s going to be very physically tested over the multi-month run.

Happily she lived up to her billing and then some. Continue reading →

Pippin (ピピン）

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  • ピピン (Pippin), 9/3/22 (Sat)

This is a reproduction of Diane Paulus’ imaginative Broadway revival of a few years back with a mix of Japanese actors and foreign acrobats. The Paulus rendering was a big success in both its touring version and the Japanese adaptation two years ago, so it’s no surprise to see it revived. The leading player is again played by half-black pop singer Crystal Kay, thus keeping the basic idea of a black lead. (The role in the first Japanese production years ago was taken by Suzuki Papaya, a comedian whose only black connection is his trademark afro wig.) They’ve also managed, intentionally or not, to find another performer with foreign blood for the title role, with the half-Spanish Shirota Yu replaced by the Japan-raised Burmese musical actor Morisaki Win. An American woman reviewing the Kay-Shirota version marveled that biracial performers were cast in both of the main roles, seeing this as an earth-shattering sign of growing diversity in Japan. She seems unaware of the many popular mixed-race or mixed-nationality performers that have appeared on Japanese stages over the years, such as Kusakari Masao, Miyazawa Rie, Okada Masumi and so on; the majority of the cast in a production of Rent some years back was half-Japanese. Japanese don’t make a big deal of it, and I wish Americans in particular would follow their lead.

The production still looks great. Paulus has managed to take a creaky show that was known mainly for Bob Fosse’s iconic staging and give it a new take that reinvigorates it. It’s still a relic of the flower-power generation, but it plays beautifully. Continue reading →

Encores! revives itself

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  • Encores! revives itself

6/16/22 (Thurs)

It’s a happy surprise to see that the City Center Encores! series has reversed course from its attempt to right the racist ways of the Broadway musical, returning to its original mission of presenting great theater. The three musicals chosen for next year, all worthy picks, are Jerry Herman’s notable flop Dear World (1969), the millennial operetta The Light in the Piazza (2005) and the British megahit Oliver! (1960).

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West Side Story (2021)

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  • West Side Story (2021)

2/12/22 (Sat)

I was equally excited by and wary of the idea of a new film version of West Side Story (see here). The 1961 film, as with the original stage show four years earlier, was portraying contemporary events by people who were there. Any remake would necessarily involve a reinterpretation of the story filtered through a modern sensibility, and it was hardly a comfort that it was being led by the ever-woke team of director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner. The original show, which portrays a turf war between Polish-American and Puerto Rican social outcasts, has been criticized by some as an outmoded, semi-racist piece by four Jewish white guys (choreographer, writer, composer, lyricist), though you could also say four gay guys if that helps. The last Broadway revival in 2020, which I did not see, was reportedly an extreme makeover with a distinctly modern perspective, including references to Black Lives Matters, extensive use of video screens, and modern dance in place of Jerome Robbins’ iconic ballet-inspired choreography. That closed quickly due to the pandemic but did not subsequently reopen, suggesting that the producers didn’t have much confidence in its commercial prospects. It was hard to say what to expect with Spielberg, though the previews encouragingly looked like a more traditional approach.

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