Ikiru (生きる)

Posted on by
  • 生きる (Ikiru)

9/29/18 (Sat)

I hadn’t seen this 1952 classic in years, but with Miyamoto Amon’s Broadway-aimed musical version set to debut (in Japanese) next week, I figured it was time for a revisit. It didn’t strike me as an obvious choice for musicalization given the halting communication skills of the main character, who is not exactly Mr. Excitement, and I wondered how they could top the haunting “Gondola no Uta” that the man sings on the swing in the iconic finale. First, a look at the film.

Continue reading →

Bunraku: Roben and the Cedar Tree, Zoho Chushingura (良弁杉由来、増補忠臣蔵)

Posted on by
  • Bunraku: 良弁杉由来、増補忠臣蔵  (Roben and the Cedar Tree, Zoho Chushingura)

9/15/18 (Sat), Tokyo

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, and the National Theatre is featuring two productions from that era. After an astounding period of creativity, Bunraku had pretty much halted as a living art in the 18th century, and not many pieces were being written at this point. Whereas the Kabuki world was undertaking some dramatic experiments incorporating Western concepts, these puppet pieces stay safely within the bounds of their predecessors — which is fine when done as well as it is here.   Continue reading →

Kabuki: Yugen (幽玄)

Posted on by
  • Kabuki: 幽玄 (Yugen)

9/12/18 (Wed), Tokyo Kabukiza

All the shows in this month’s evening performance were pieces derived from ancient Noh theater: Sanbaso, a comic take on the austere Okina; the great Shunkan, Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s brash reworking of the old drama; and a new dance piece by National Living Treasure Tamasaburo based on the classics Hagoromo, Shakkyo and Dojoji.

Continue reading →

The Damned (play)

Posted on by
  • The Damned

7/21/18 (Sat), New York

An overwrought stage version of the Visconti film by man-of-the-hour Ivo van Hove, the busy avant-garde Belgian director. He’s best known for his minimalist productions, as in the interesting View from the Bridge, but here he’s taken a sharp turn to maximalist.

The saga, which broadly follows the movie plot, revolves around a rich steel manufacturer who has chosen unwisely to deal with the Nazis just as they are coming to power. The intricate story involves betrayal, greed, murder, suicide, political brutality, incest and other pleasantries, only to result in the end in the loss of the family’s steel plants to Hitler’s regime as the nation marches inexorably toward war.

Continue reading →

Carmen Jones

Posted on by
  • Carmen Jones

7/20/18 (Fri), New York Off Broadway

Oscar Hammerstein II completed this English-language version of Carmen, reset in a black community in wartime America, just before turning to the starkly different world of Carousel, which I saw on Broadway a few days earlier. Carmen feels almost like a musical in the first place (Carousel, for that matter, sometimes feels like opera), so it makes much more sense as a Broadway show than, say, the La Boheme staging some years back. Still, the vocal requirements for this show must be a killer for an eight-performance week, and other issues, not least some less-than-PC black dialect, make productions pretty rare – the last time I saw it was in London several decades ago. So I wasn’t going to miss this.

Continue reading →

Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof)

Posted on by
  • Fidler Afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof)

7/19/18 (Thurs), National Yiddish Theatre

A Fiddler in Yiddish – sounds crazy, no? This was a Yiddish version that played in Israel in 1965, just a year after the show debuted on Broadway, and has evidently not been seen since. I was going to take advantage of a rare Thursday matinee – the show doesn’t play on Fri nights or Sat matinees, for reasons obvious if you’re Jewish – but a friend happened to be going that night and had an extra ticket.

As it turns out, this was not just another Fiddler. The use of Yiddish, which would have been the language of the characters in real life, provided an unexpectedly fresh perspective on the familiar show. Continue reading →

One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな）

Posted on by
  • カメラを止めるな（One Cut of the Dead）

8/15/18 (Wed), Tokyo

This zany film – literally, “Don’t Stop the Camera!” or “Keep It Rolling!” – has become a sensation in Japan, a low-budget little-film-that-could by a no-name director and cast that has spread like wildfire from a single out-of-the-way theater to nationwide release. Shows were sold out from morning to night in the peak o-bon holiday season. No one would tell me anything more about the film than that it involves zombies, which would normally make me turn the other way. But the word was so strong that I finally gave in to the hype and snagged a late-night ticket.

The first half-hour is taken up by an amateurish film with overripe acting and questionable direction, where actors making a zombie movie encounter actually zombies. My heart sank, and I started wondering what I was doing there. But then there comes a sharp change in gears that makes it all worth it. Continue reading →

Carousel

Posted on by
  • Carousel, 7/17/18 (Tues), Broadway

I hadn’t initially intended to see this production of Carousel. The show is notoriously tricky to get right, and the last Broadway production, an import from London, set an extremely high standard. The typical British approach of darkening the material, which sank Oklahoma!, Oliver and Mary Poppins among others, worked spectacularly for this already dark show in what is still one of the best revivals I’ve ever seen. Beyond that inevitable comparison, this new production was further burdened by feminist complaints in these more enlightened times, not entirely unjustified, over the lead’s penchant for smacking his wife, making me suspect that the director would hold back from some of the show’s unpleasantries. But the word was generally good, including a rave by a good friend. So, when I ended up here after all, just five minutes before curtain (other shows were sold out), I went in with reasonably high expectations.

Continue reading →