Category Archives: Musical

My Not-So-Fair Lady: Those dangerous old musicals

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  • My Not-So-Fair Lady: Those dangerous old musicals

The New York Times has decided that old musicals are a danger to society. A recent article, “The Problem With Broadway Revivals: They Revive Gender Stereotypes, Too”, complains that revivals of Carousel, My Fair Lady and Kiss Me, Kate present women as inferior beings who endure abuse from their male counterparts: “Billy Bigelow hits Julie Jordan. Henry Higgins molds Eliza Doolittle. Fred tames Lilli.” It claims unsurprisingly that these revivals are a “huge conversation” among the #MeToo movement. (It also discusses Pretty Woman, a new musical based on the film that is scheduled to open this year.) The article quotes worried musician Georgia Stitt as saying, “In 2017 is the correct message really ‘women are there to be rescued’?”

Well, no. That’s not the message at all, and the problem isn’t the musicals but the shriveled viewpoint of those perpetual victims who turn everything they touch into proof of their own suffering. Stacy Wolf, an academic (naturally) who has written a feminist history of Broadway, calls the characters in such musicals “pathetic”, and Stitt asks rhetorically, “Are these the shows I’m going to take my 12-year-old daughter to?”

Depends on how you look it, doesn’t it? Continue reading →

Takarazuka: South Pacific (宝塚: 南太平洋 )

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  • 宝塚: 南太平洋 (Takarazuka: South Pacific)

4/10/13 (Wed), Tokyo

At first glance, South Pacific seemed the least likely of the big Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals to be given the Takarazuka treatment given the high macho factor: “There’s Nothing Like a Dame” has a whole chorus of men grumbling about the lack of women, “Younger Than Springtime” calls in the script for a shirtless guy (implying some off-stage fun), and “Honey Bun” features a man in drag with coconuts for boobs. Also, the theme of racial discrimination wouldn’t resonate whatsoever with this group’s core audience. More than that, the text states explicitly that the soldiers are there to fight the Japanese, which no one in this country wants to hear about. (In the last version I saw in Tokyo, an import from London, the subtitles used katakana, the alphabet used for foreign words, for all references to the Japanese military (ニホン軍) as if Japan were a foreign country.) But, of course, it’s a big romantic story with two juicy male leading roles, an ideal combination for these guys (girls), and the super-maleness was certainly a prime attraction for me. There was no way I was going to miss this opportunity to catch some high camp.

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Spielberg’s (!) West Side Story

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  • Spielberg’s (!) West Side Story 

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 →

コメディ・トゥナイト (A Funny Thing…Forum)

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  • コメディ・トゥナイト (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum)

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.

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メンフィス (Memphis)

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  • メンフィス (Memphis)

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 →

Hamilton

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  • Hamilton

11/29/17 (Wed), LA Pantages

I hadn’t felt overly compelled to see Hamilton because of the insane pricing and the rap or hip-hop music (I’m not sure I know the difference). Still, it’s gone beyond musical to bona fide cultural phenomenon and a mega-hit on a scale I’ve never seen. As with Avatar way back when, I was curious to catch it at some point just to see what the fuss was about. I was happy when a friend said she managed to get a ticket when I visited LA, but was shocked when I learned that she had paid through the nose and only got one ticket. I wouldn’t have let her do that if I had known, not wanting to leave her behind or give that kind of money to greedy producers. But it was done, and I accepted her generosity. It turned out that four tickets were available at the box office at normal prices just before the show, but I thought it better not to mention that to my friend.

Continue reading →

New York (November 2017)

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  • Junk, 11/16/17 (Thurs), Lincoln Center
  • Torch Song, 11/17/17 (Fri), Broadway
  • Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, 11/18/17 (Sat), off Broadway
  • Time and the Conways, 11/18/17 (Sat), Broadway
  • The Band’s Visit, 11/19/17 (Sun), Broadway
  • Brigadoon, 11/19/17 (Sun), Encores!

A brief visit to New York on the way elsewhere. Shows I missed this time included Dear Evan Hansen (tickets impossible to get in the lead actor’s final days) as well as Hamilton and Bruce Springsteen (tried half-heartedly and unsuccessfully for the lottery for both). I decided against the revival of M Butterfly, one of my favorite shows, when I heard that the author had added a part describing how the Chinese guy disguised his “package”, which sounded much too literal for a show about illusion. (And I didn’t need another apparent reference by Hwang to small Asian penises, an obsession he needs to overcome.)   Continue reading →

A Look Back: La Cage Aux Folles (musical)

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

Another Japanese revival of the popular La Cage Aux Folles is opening soon, so 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 tell us (rather than subtly lead us) to love gays and hate bigots and so forth. As I noted, that “is partly a function of the changing times, a trend that the musical itself helped bring about”. But it’s looking more like a period piece than the pure farce intended in the French film (I haven’t seen the original French play). The French are clearly much more relaxed about sexual matters like this – the film 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.

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A Look Back: Young Frankenstein

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  • A Look Back: Young Frankenstein

I’m pleased to see that Young Frankenstein has opened triumphantly in London in a significantly revised version from the less celebrated Broadway original. I’ve always loved the movie, which I saw in its original run, and a stage show seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately, the New York version, which I saw in previews almost precisely ten years ago (Oct 15, 2007), opened against impossible expectations in the wake of the same creative team’s phenomenally successful The Producers, and the producers did themselves no favors by announcing outrageous premium prices (then still a budding concept) before the show even opened. The reaction was perhaps inevitably less than hoped. And I have to say that the middling reception was justified. Continue reading →

Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

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  • Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

10/10/17 (Tues)

Add another exclamation point to Hello, Dolly! The NY Times reports that premium tickets to the mega-hit between now and the departure of superstar Bette Midler in January will go for an eye-popping $998. That “98” sounds like Walmart marking its prices just short of the next dollar mark, and it would be nice to think that the producers are embarrassed enough to want to avoid four figures. But we know, of course, that they don’t care a whit about what anyone thinks given the overwhelming demand and limited supply for their tickets (which will actually cost $1,009 with Ticketmaster’s usurious charges, reaching four figures anyway).

Once upon a time, the theater was at least nominally an egalitarian business: you stood in line, you got your tickets when your turn came around. You knew that everyone else in an orchestra seat paid the same as you did (other than perhaps discounted day seats). Black, white, male, female, American, foreign, tall, short: everyone had an equal chance at getting a ticket. Yes, scalpers always existed, and we all knew that the rich weren’t standing in any line for their tickets. But we could comfort ourselves with the knowledge that scalping at outrageous prices was at least illegal. Now it’s the producers themselves who are charging those prices, claiming that they’re being deprived of all that illegal money. Got it? Instead of finding ways to prevent illegitimate activity, they’ve simply made it legitimate.

They have every right to do so, of course; no one is forcing the public to buy tickets, and allowing supply/demand to determine prices is the very basis of capitalism. The limited supply of tickets has to be allocated somehow, and doing that through pricing is no less legitimate than through first-come, first-served, i.e., time vs. money. What that means in real life, though, is that like elsewhere in our society, the rich go to the front of the ticket line, and you, the not-rich, go to the back. The theatrical community no longer even pretends to be treating everyone equally. Fair enough. But when the largely left-of-center Broadway community goes on about diversity and the poor and undocumented immigrants and all that, their words ring awfully hollow.

Continue reading →

Prince of Broadway: Wish List

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Reviewing Prince of Broadway in Tokyo a few years back, I had made some suggestions on how the creators might have approached the material. I had been hoping for interesting tidbits on the art of producing/directing or even backstage stories rather than just random songs in their original stagings. Harold Prince wanted to present the “arc” of his shows by staging representative numbers, but setting aside whether that’s even possible, that’s not what we got, at least in Tokyo (does “The Ladies Who Lunch” really show the arc of Company, for example?).  And it’s not necessarily what we wanted.

With the show on Broadway now (apparently in much the same format), I’ve been asked — challenged, really — to elaborate. I like a dare, so here are a few examples of the kind of show I would have liked to have seen. I don’t pretend to be a writer – I took these from vague recollections of articles and interviews with a few quotes thrown in and made up most of the rest – but I wasn’t as interested in the details as in conveying the general concept. Hopefully it will get the point across.

Continue reading →

Aladdin (アラジン)

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  • アラジン (Aladdin)

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.

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