History of the Broadway Musical: Oklahoma! (1943)

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(A sample chapter that I wrote for a planned book on the Broadway musical intended for Japanese publication. I hadn’t planned to release this in English, but here it is in slightly revised form.)

History of the Broadway Musical: Oklahoma! (1943)

In 1943, as America was fighting on both sides of the water in WWII, Broadway saw the debut of perhaps the most influential show in American musical theater history. Oklahoma! not only become one of the most successful musicals ever written but single-handedly transformed the landscape of Broadway.

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History of the Broadway Musical: Intro

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(An excerpt from a sample chapter that I wrote several years back for a proposed book on the history of the Broadway musical for Japanese publication. I hadn’t planned to release this in English, but here it is in slightly revised form.)

History of the Broadway Musical: Intro

Birth of the musical

Nothing springs from nothing, and there was plenty of musical entertainment in the pre-modern age. The first musical more or less in the modern sense, however, is said to be The Black Crook of 1866. As the story has it, the manager of New York’s 3,200-seat Niblo’s Garden had booked a melodrama about an evil count who, coveting a beautiful woman, sends her lover to a black magic master looking for new souls to feed the devil. On the way, the lover frees a dove, which turns out to be a Fairy Queen who rescues him and saves the day. Burdened with that story, the manager was looking for musical material when a fire destroyed another major theater nearby, leaving a Parisian ballet troupe and some huge sets without a home. The two sides threw their shows together and unwittingly gave rise to a new art form.

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A Look Back: Oslo

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With the recent release of the film version of Oslo on HBO, I thought it worth revisiting my brief thoughts on the stage version at Lincoln Center some years back during a trip to New York. I missed the Japanese version at Tokyo’s New National Theatre back in February. I was wondering how the general lack of knowledge here about (or interest in) Middle Eastern affairs might affect the characterizations; even accents are rarely used to distinguish varying nationalities, i.e., everyone speaks standard Japanese, sometimes making it hard to figure out who is who. It apparently sold well, helped by a starry cast, so hopefully there will be revival at some point. Continue reading →

Utamaro and His Five Women (歌麿をめぐる五人の女 )

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  • 歌麿をめぐる五人の女

6/7/21 (Mon)

Mizoguchi Kenji’s 1946 work on the famed ukiyoe artist was evidently one of the first movies to be approved after the war by the American occupying forces. Mizoguchi is widely said to have seen himself in the story of the devoted artist, which here involves censorship and female issues, but the same can probably by said for any film about a struggling artist from Lust for Life onwards. Given the director’s usual concern with the difficulties of women in Japanese society, I had assumed the female half of the title would be the film’s centerpiece.

In fact, though the five women dominate the narrative, the thematic focus is Utamaro’s obsession with his art. Continue reading →

The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記)

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  • にっぽん昆虫記 (The Insect Woman)

6/6/21 (Sun)

After Imamura Shohei’s previous work, the madcap Pigs and Battleships, I was ready for anything. This 1963 film – the literal Japanese title is a more clinical Chronicle of Japanese Insects – followed an effective two-year ban of the director by Nikkatsu for his over-the-top and over-the-budget Pigs. Still, Imamura, unbowed, held nothing back in his new piece about a ruthless woman who does whatever she can to survive. The brutal results ironically became the biggest-grossing film in his career, which presumably mollified the studio’s concerns.

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Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦)

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  • 豚と軍艦 (Pigs and Battleships)

6/1/21 (Tues)

The wild 1961 film that put director Imamura Shohei on the map (and got him banned from studio for two years). It’s a black comedy mixed with social satire about Japanese civilians and American sailors in Yokosuka, a coastal town near Tokyo that hosts a major US naval base, around 1960.

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The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol)

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  • Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator)

5/19/21 (Wed)

Juraj Herz’s long-banned film of 1969 was part of the Czech New Wave, which largely disappeared when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the previous year. The setting is the 1930s just ahead of the Nazi takeover of the country. The head of a crematorium adheres to the Tibetan teaching that death helps end human suffering and open the way to a new future life, making him feel good about preparing people for their end – both the dead bodies entrusted to him and the living humans that he took it upon himself to “liberate”. Continue reading →

The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze)

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  • Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street)

5/9/21 (Sun)

I was browsing through Criterion’s selection of Best Foreign Language Oscar winners and chose this 1965 Czechoslovakian film by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos without knowing much about it. It turned out to be a Holocaust comedy, not a crowded category, set in 1942 in the newly created Nazi puppet state of Slovakia. The Tiso regime has accepted the Nuremberg Race Laws, setting off the conflict that drives the drama.

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Zero Focus (ゼロの焦点)

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  • ゼロの焦点 (Zero Focus)

4/29/21 (Thurs)

An amateurish murder mystery from 1961, based on a popular book, that wouldn’t pass muster even as a daytime television film. A woman is just a week into her arranged marriage when her husband mysteriously disappears. He is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, an incident that is ruled a suicide – but is it? The women comes to find that there is more to her husband’s past than she had imagined.

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Children of the Beehive, The Hairpin, Mr. Thank You （蜂の巣の子供たち、簪、有難うさん）

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  • 蜂の巣の子供たち (Children of the Beehive), 4/25/21 (Sun)
  • 簪（かんざし）(The Hairpin), 4/27/21 (Tues)
  • 有難うさん (Mr. Thank You)、4/27/21 (Tues)

Three films by the unjustly neglected Shimizu Hiroshi. Continue reading →