Fiddler on the Roof (Trevor Nunn)

  • Fiddler on the Roof, 6/12/19 (Tues), West End

I had no intention of seeing this show for the umpteenth time, especially so soon after the magnificent Yiddish version on my last New York visit. But I was attracted by the rare Tuesday matinee, and the Trevor Nunn production and this cast had been very well received.

The show is indestructible and works beautifully here as always. But the acting is variable and overall not very Jewish, at least by the Yiddish-theater-inspired standards as conceived originally. Continue reading

Orpheus Descending

  • Orpheus Descending

6/9/19 (Sun), London Menier Chocolate Factory

Revival of an infrequently produced and much-rewritten Tennessee Williams play of 1957. A hunky 30-year-old wanderer and troubadour named Val finds his way into a general store run by the hard-minded Lady, a woman trapped in a small-minded Southern town and a loveless marriage. She is haunted by the death of her father, an Italian immigrant, at the hands of racist townsmen twenty years earlier, who set fire to his beloved establishment after he served black customers. Something inside of her having died as well, Lady has remained in the town unemotionally running the store with her callous husband. The husband is now dying of cancer, and Lady, though wary of the young Val, agrees to hire him to help mind the store. His presence reawakens her repressed passion, as things go in these plays, and her feelings are sharpened further by the revelation that it was her husband who led the riot against her father that caused his death. Lady, with a new life literally growing inside her (after an apparent night of fun), asks Val to take her away. The result is not pretty.

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Encores! and… Millie??

  • Encores! and… Millie??

What is Encores! thinking? New York City Center’s celebrated limited-run concert series of rarely performed Broadway musicals, offering starry casts and an onstage orchestra playing the original orchestrations, is either running low on imagination or falling victim to some serious governance issues. Its three shows for its 27th season next year include two eminently worthy choices in cult musical Mack & Mabel and the Kurt Weill-Alan Jay Lerner curiosity Love Life, along with – wait for it – the 2002 show Thoroughly Modern Millie, a limp adaptation of the limp 1960s film spoof.

What a letdown. Continue reading

Bitter Wheat

  • Bitter Wheat, 6/13/19 (Thurs), London West End

O, Mamet, where is thy sting? A show satirizing the Harvey Weinstein affair should be a breeze for the ever-caustic playwright David Mamet, who has had plenty of experience skewering Hollywood on stage (Speed the Plow), page (Bambi vs. Godzilla) and screen (Wag the Dog) and has presumably dealt with Weinstein himself at some point. So what happened?

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Gate of Hell (地獄門)

  • 地獄門 (Gate of Hell)

5/18/19 (Sat)

I watched Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1953 film after the death of its star Kyo Machiko a few days earlier. This was apparently Japan’s first color film to be distributed worldwide, and it made a huge impression, winning major awards at Cannes, the Oscars and elsewhere. Coming shortly after Rashomon, it cemented Japan’s place on the map of world cinema, a position that was to be further enhanced over the decade to follow. (Some have suggested that the title in Japanese, Jigokumon, was aimed at riding the coattails of Rashomon (mon = gate), but that seems far-fetched.)

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The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

  • The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

5/6/19 (Mon), Tokyo

Who knew dystopian theater could be so much fun? A rundown tenement somewhere in what looks like pre-war Europe (the creators call their group 1927, so I’ll go with that) becomes increasingly unmanageable, and the deprived children are becoming dangerously restless. A well-meaning mother brings her daughter to the area in the belief that all the kids really need is art classes and pasta sculptures. She gradually gets caught up in reality as the situation worsens and her daughter is kidnapped. The kids go a step too far when they kidnap the mayor’s cat, prompting authorities to turn to, let’s say, chemical means to quell the problem.

What could be a depressingly heavy-handed story is presented in a subversively light-hearted manner that makes its point much more subtly. Continue reading

“Man problem” at NY Times

The NY Times has printed yet another theatrical essay bemoaning the male supremacist content of classic Broadway musicals (“The Broadway Musical Has a Man Problem”, May 2, 2019). The author, one Amanda Hess, states,

“In 2019, a central obsession of American culture is the reassessment of all of its previous obsessions. We are reviewing our stories with a skeptical eye and banishing outdated plots on feminist grounds.”

Really? And who is this we, Tonto? Continue reading

Le Marie-Vison (毛皮のマリー )

  • 毛皮のマリー (Le Marie-Vison)

4/2/19 (Tues), Tokyo New National Theatre

This is one of four Tokyo productions in recent months of Terayama Shuji’s classic underground work from the late 1960s. This production stars Miwa Akihiro, the cross-dressing television and singing personality who was the inspiration for the show and its original star back when he was young and cute. He was so impossibly campy in Mishima’s Black Lizard a few years back that I walked out, but given his close association with this role, I figured I’d give him another chance. The direction follows that of the original hippie-era production. The Japanese and French titles (taken from a song popularized by Yves Montand) translate to something like “Marie in Mink”.

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CNN’s Reiwa agenda

4/3/2019

Every Japanese emperor gets his own imperial era name, one of the perks of the job, and it was announced this week to great fanfare that the era to take effect when the new emperor is enthroned on May 1 will be named Reiwa.  Thus, the remainder of 2019 will be known in Japan as Reiwa 1, and succeeding years will follow in kind until the next emperor takes over. The present era, Heisei, will finish its 31-year run when the current emperor, Akihito, abdicates on April 30. He will be known in future textbooks as Emperor Heisei.

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A Good Man, A Good Day (好人好日)

  • 好人好日 (A Good Man, A Good Day)

1/26/19 (Sat), Tokyo

A film retrospective of the noted actress Iwashita Shima offered a double-feature bringing together two works in which she played the daughter of Ozu favorite Ryu Chishu. And that’s where the similarities stop. Continue reading