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I came across an article I wrote for GQ Japan on a Japanese production of the musical Rent in the 26 October 2012 edition. The article was in Japanese and significantly cut (I wrote way too much as usual), so I’m including both the English and unedited Japanese versions here. Rent is hugely popular in Japan, and there have been other productions since. This is the view as of 2012.
6/20/20 (Sat), Tokyo
Almodovar in an unusually contemplative mood in this semi-autobiographical film. Continue reading
7/9/20 (Wed)
A fascinating play by Lorraine Hansberry of Raisin in the Sun fame, left unfinished at her early death and reworked by her husband for its debut in 1970. She wrote this apparently in response to a production she attended in 1961 of Genet’s hugely successful Les Nègres, wanting to jettison the exoticism of his show for a more realistic portrait of colonialism and the African experience.
With the mega-hit musical Hamilton due on television in a few days, I thought it a good time to rerun my review of three years ago. This is not part of the series of made-for-TV reproductions of classic shows – one of the best of which, Grease, was helmed by Hamilton’s own director Thomas Kail – but the actual stage version of the musical filmed with multiple cameras in live performance way back when with the original cast. We’ll see if Disney got its $75 million worth (that figure is not a typo), especially given what would seem to be limited international interest in the subject – I’d hate to be the person writing the Japanese subtitles. But the stage show has reportedly passed $1 billion in global revenues, including $650 million from New York alone, and spawned by far the best-selling Broadway cast album in history. With a usurious official ticket price on Broadway of up to $1,150 (also not a typo – don’t even ask about scalper prices), the audiences for the show have inevitably been less diverse than the famously racially mixed cast. As such, the television production will truly bring this to a new viewership. Hopefully it will lure a wider fan base to live theater once the nation’s stages reopen.
I’m still wary of the show’s version of history. Wait until the mobs find out that Hamilton, presented here as an ambitious Latin immigrant, was actually a 100% white guy (three-quarters British, one-quarter French) who espoused virulent anti-immigrant views and, in going to New York from the Caribbean, was simply moving from one British colony to another. Here’s my review.
6/28/20 (Sun), Tokyo
Harold Pinter’s 1963 film script portrays a manservant (a superb Dirk Bogarde) who insinuates his way into the home of an apathetic upper-class gentleman (Tony Fox) and proceeds to turn the tables, the new guard displacing the old. It’s a familiar Pinter setup, unrealistic by any standards other than Pinter’s own plays. Pinter was already a highly bankable playwright at the time and did not appreciably change his cryptic theater-of-the-absurd style for the screen. Still, it’s done with great flair. The director of what seems a quintessentially British work is in fact an American, Joseph Losey, who was blacklisted in Hollywood in the McCarthy era and made his name in Europe. This was the first of several acclaimed films he made with Pinter.
(While this Japanese-directed production last year had its issues, it had its fans in Tokyo, and I was interested to see how it would fare overseas. Unfortunately its foreign debut in Dresden was cancelled due to the pandemic. I had written the article below for the international run, so I’m reprinting that here.)
The iconoclastic Japanese stage director Amon Miyamoto has a problem with Madame Butterfly. The stereotypical image of a spurned geisha? The sexual exploitation of a 15-year-old girl? A warped Western view of his country?
No, he feels that the opera mistreats the American.
That would be Pinkerton, the US naval lieutenant who purchases Butterfly’s temporary companionship for 100 yen, speaks blithely on their wedding day of one day taking a “real American wife,” leaves Japan almost immediately after marrying and impregnating her, and returns unannounced three years later with a new bride to retrieve his son and take him back to the US. He is typically portrayed as a villain, and it’s not hard to see why – the opera has even been criticized by some as anti-American.
Miyamoto, as usual, takes his own path in a co-production of the Semperoper Dresden, Tokyo Nikikai Opera, Royal Danish Theatre and San Francisco Opera that debuted in Tokyo in October. Continue reading
5/17/20 (Sun), Tokyo
With bars (and shops and restaurants and theaters and on and on) shut down now by the coronavirus pandemic for far too long, I was worried about a friend who runs a drinking spot in downtown Tokyo. So I suggested hosting a movie night on the big screen in his bar just for his regular customers. He liked the idea and chose this film, figuring that a light comedy would be a safe bet for the trial run. I didn’t recognize the choice at first because of the bland Japanese title メルシィ人生！(“Merci, Life!”), which could apply to hundreds of films. If they couldn’t find an equivalent to The Closet (an exact translation of the French title), surely there was a more interesting alternative out there. Some in the bar speculated that the distributors may not have wanted to emphasize the gay part when the movie debuted in 2001, but this is not, after all, a gay film – the gay angle is played for laughs if anything. I wonder if their obtuseness actually hurt the film’s commercial appeal. In any case, after weeks of watching movies at home, I really enjoyed being with a group of people laughing at the same film. I’m ready to get back to the movie theaters, and I suspect I’m not alone.
5/3/20 (Sun)
Paul Schrader’s 1985 film biography is to this day not available in Japan despite being entirely in Japanese and featuring some noted Japanese stars. Mishima is known for his extreme conservative views, but his criticism of Emperor Showa for renouncing his godliness (Mishima felt that this meant that Japanese soldiers went to war for nothing) was a step too far even for his fellow far-rightists, who do not take well to any bad-mouthing of the imperial family. Mishima’s works are one thing, but a story about his life, which must inevitably deal with the circumstances of his self-disembowelment, is politically an untouchable subject – and the right wing in particular can be very unpleasant about these things. Mishima’s widow was also upset by the references to Mishima’s homosexuality, which she was not entirely able to purge from the film. So I was surprised at a friend’s house to find a copy of the DVD that had been purchased in the US, which I promptly borrowed.
4/30/20 (Thurs)
Shinoda Masahiro’s film adaptation of 1971, just two years after the novel was published, was supposedly co-written by the novelist Endo Shusaku, but I have to wonder how much he contributed given the way the movie veers from the book in some important respects, especially the ending. It follows the general contour of the story fairly straightforwardly, but gives precedence to the drama over the religious and philosophical themes at the heart of the tale. That makes an interesting contrast with Scorsese’s 2016 remake, which had greater sweep (and clearly a budget to match) and delved more deeply into the priest’s struggle with his beliefs.
4/12/20 (Sun)
Andrew Lloyd Webber has opened up his catalog for free streaming over weekends during this irritating coronavirus plague. I missed the previous week’s opening, Joseph…, not realizing that the download expired after the weekend. So I made sure to tune in for the next biblical pop opera, Jesus, by Sunday, which was after all Easter. I’d never seen this in any version and would normally have preferred to wait and see it in a theater. But this was a live unedited film of a 2012 production, so it’s the next best thing. Plus the price was right.
The gay (in every way) French farce La Cage Aux Folles has had a storied history, enjoying success as a French movie (at the time America’s highest grossing foreign-language film ever), a long-running musical since revived on Broadway twice (winning Tony Awards on all three occasions), and an unfortunate hit American film version with Robin Williams. Given its history, it is amazing that the source play has never been performed in English. That has been rectified with this production in a tiny Fringe theater off the beaten path in a spirited translation by the estimable Simon Callow. Since the first film, the show has become more and more preachy and less and less interesting with each incarnation. A particularly cavernous gap exists between the casual French film, which was interested in the gay relationship only for its comic potential, and the American versions, where the gayness was the entire point. I saw the French film in its original release in the 1970s and loved the unashamed treatment of the topic, including the fearlessly “out” portrayal by the leads and Albin’s unexpectedly moving revelation at the dinner, both daring for the time. The politician’s slow burn at Albin’s confession was also masterful. The American versions seem embarrassed by the gay content and go out of their way to make their wokeness known. I’ve always been curious about the source play that started the whole thing, so this was an opportunity I wasn’t going to miss.
12/27/19 (Fri)
Did the reviewers see the same movie I did? This Korean film has won rhapsodic praise as a social satire and is being talked about as an Oscar candidate, but it seemed to me an overblown attempt at farce relying on impossible situations and questionable characterizations.
sekenbanashi 