Category Archives: Play

Kung Fu

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Kung Fu

3/20/14 (Sun), New York

Kung Fu, a portrait of Bruce Lee’s rise to fame, was a guilty pleasure. Other than the wonderful M Butterfly, I’m not wild about the author David Henry Hwang, who is obsessed with the tired theme of second-generation Asians struggling to adapt to America. (Bruce Lee, though raised in Hong Kong, was born in San Francisco and tried for years to make a life in the US.) I wish he’d go find his identity and come back with other ideas. And the reviews were lukewarm, which wasn’t encouraging. Still, the idea of a kung fu musical seemed so obvious that it immediately grabbed my attention.  Continue reading →

Liolà

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Liolà

10/27/13 (Sun), London, National Theatre

Liolà, a rather obscure Pirandello play, seemed an odd choice for the National Theatre. But if nothing else, it was being directed by Richard Eyre, soon to retire as the National’s artistic director after a spectacularly successful term. That seemed good enough reason to catch it.  Continue reading →

Takarazuka Boys (宝塚 BOYS)

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宝塚 BOYS (Takarazuka Boys)

8/7/13 (Wed), Tokyo

A dramatization of Hankyu Corporation’s efforts to create a male counterpart to its all-girl Takarazuka troupe after the war. Given the experiment’s failure and the setting amid the ashes of a defeated Japan, I assumed the play would be a standard weepie. But a friend invited me, and I figured it may at least have some camp value.

It was pretty much as feared. Continue reading →

Greasepaint (化粧)

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化粧 2幕

5/26/09 (Tue), Tokyo

This is a frequently revived one-woman show by the prolific Inoue Hisashi that’s been around since the early 1980s starring Watanabe Misako. Besides Japan, it’s been performed by Watanabe in Paris, London and the U.S. in Japanese, and there was a brief English-language production in London with Frances de la Tour under the name Greasepaint (much more evocative than the usual English title Makeup). The show was sold out throughout the entire run, but I was fortunate to get a same-day seat.
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London shows (June 2016)

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  • How the Other Half Loves, 6/11/16 (Sat), West End
  • Showboat, 6/11/16 (Sat), West End
  • In the Heights, 6/12/16 (Sun), King’s Cross
  • Iris, 6/14/16 (Tues), Holland Park Opera
  • The Invisible Hand, 6/15/16 (Wed), Tricycle
  • Elegy, 6/16/16 (Thurs), Donmar
  • The Flying Lovers Of Vitebsk, 6/18/16 (Sat), Sam Wanamaker
  • The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, 6/19/16 (Sun), West End
  • Macbeth, 6/19/16 (Sun), Globe

Continue reading →

Toast/The Effect

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Toast, 4/24/16 (Sun), Off Broadway

The Effect, 4/24/16 (Sun), Off Broadway

Toast: A revival of the debut piece by the entertaining British writer Richard Bean. I usually avoid US productions of UK shows because of differing acting styles and accents all over the map, but this was imported intact from London in the Brits on Broadway series. The unglamorous setting is a canteen in an aging bread factory, where the all-male work force whiles away the breaks between their grueling plant duties with cigarettes, stale sandwiches, idle talk (e.g. gossip about one worker’s affair with a toothless woman, eye-opening use for skate fish) and horseplay (a habit of crotch-grabbing in one guy’s case). Continue reading →

Eternal Chikamatsu (エターナルチカマツ）

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Eternal Chikamatsu

12 March 2016 (Sat), Tokyo

I decided rather on a whim to see this show, knowing only that it’s a riff on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 18th-century classic  Love Suicide at Amijima (心中天網島) where characters from that play somehow interact with similar modern-day counterparts. I was interested in remarks made by the director, David Leveaux, that suggested he (along with the scriptwriter) did not have a good understanding of the notion of suicide in the context of Chikamatsu’s shows. I like both the leads, Fukatsu Eri and Shichinosuke, so I figured it might be worth catching. Continue reading →

Terrace of the Leper King (ライ王のテラス )

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ライ王のテラス (Terrace of the Leper King)

3 March 2016 (Thurs), Tokyo

15 March 2016 (Tues), Tokyo

Tickets to Miyamoto Amon’s production of this Mishima work, its first large-scale revival in over 40 years, were completely sold out on the strength of its rising star Suzuki Ryohei (helped by a great poster with the sculpted Ryohei sitting shirtless front and center). I had read the play and couldn’t make much sense of the rambling theme, but the story itself was certainly dramatic. Also, the Cambodian setting offered promising design possibilities, and Amon had brought in dancers from the Royal Ballet of Cambodia and acrobats from a traditional Cambodian circus called Phare. I was ready for anything. Continue reading →