Battles Without Honor and Humanity (仁義なき戦い)

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  • 仁義なき戦い (Battles Without Honor and Humanity)

11/9/17 (Thurs)

Duty is the great theme of traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, with characters typically forced to choose between their all-important loyalty to their lord or society and a betrayal of that duty with an act of compassion or emotion. Compassion often wins out but only at great cost, usually death. The best known example of a pure loyalty tale is the ever-popular The 47 Loyal Retainers (忠臣蔵), where duty to a murdered lord leads to a meticulously planned, suicidal act of revenge by his former retainers. That sense of loyalty carries over as well into typical samurai and yakuza dramas, where duty is often itself the point.

The 1973 film Battles Without Honor and Humanity (the name would be punchier without the “humanity”’; also known by the much better title The Yakuza Papers) doesn’t just puncture that ideal but renders it a useless relic of a lost age. Continue reading →

Welcome Back, Mr McDonald (ラジオの時間 )

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  • ラジオの時間 (Welcome Back, Mr McDonald)

11/4/17 (Sat)

The prolific stage/film writer Mitani Koki has his good days [The Last Laugh (笑いの大学), Twelve Gentle Japanese (12人の優しい日本人)] and bad (most of his output), and this 1997 film, based on his 1993 stage show, is one of the latter. Continue reading →

A Look Back: La Cage Aux Folles (musical)

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  • A Look Back: La Cage Aux Folles (musical)

Another Japanese revival of the popular La Cage Aux Folles is opening soon, so I figured it was a good time to rerun my modest rewrite. The musical is great fun, but I’ve always been bothered by its preachiness. It shakes a virtual finger to tell us (rather than subtly lead us) to love gays and hate bigots and so forth. As I noted, that “is partly a function of the changing times, a trend that the musical itself helped bring about”. But it’s looking more like a period piece than the pure farce intended in the French film (I haven’t seen the original French play). The French are clearly much more relaxed about sexual matters like this – the film dates from the 1970s, when openly gay-themed shows in English were pretty rare – and their approach was more cunning in underlining the couple’s basic humanity.

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Needles and Opium

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  • Needles and Opium

10/10/15 (Sat), Tokyo, ¥7,500

A revival of Lepage’s breakout one-man show of 1995 – a reworking really, since it adds a character and evidently ups the technology factor considerably. I never saw the original, but any Lepage show is an event as far as I’m concerned, so I bought the tickets without knowing much about it (and despite the off-putting title).

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Kabuki: The Cuckoo…, Murder of a Foreign Envoy (沓手鳥孤城落月, 漢人韓文手管始)

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  • Kabuki: 沓手鳥孤城落月, 漢人韓文手管始  (The Cuckoo, the Solitary Castle and the Sinking Moon; Murder of a Foreign Envoy)

10/17/17 (Tues), Tokyo Kabukiza

The Cuckoo, the Solitary Castle and the Sinking Moon is a piece in the modern Shin Kabuki (New Kabuki) genre by the 20th-century playwright Tsubouchi Shoyo surrounding the historic destruction of Osaka Castle in 1615. Hideyori was supposed to have inherited the mantle of leader after his father’s death but was outwitted by the wily Ieyasu, who is now moving in for the coup de grâce. With the enemy outside the gates, Hideyori’s family and forces debate whether to go down with dignity or run for their lives. The one ace they have is Ieyasu’s granddaughter Princess Sen, who is in a political marriage with Hideyori. They hope that her presence will help waylay an outright massacre by her grandfather. Ieyasu has sent a spy to kidnap her back, but she is being watched vigilantly by Hideyori’s suspicious mother Yodo. The drama concentrates on the emotional toll that the pressure takes on the characters in the besieged castle, most notably a descent by the frantic mother into madness.

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Double Suicide (心中天網島 )

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  • Film: 心中天網島 (Double Suicide)

10/12/17 (Thurs)

Double Suicide (1969) is Masahiro Shinoda’s highly stylized take on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 18th-century Bunraku (puppet theater) masterpiece The Love Suicides at Amijima. Chikamatsu does not emerge from this well.

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A Look Back: Young Frankenstein

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  • A Look Back: Young Frankenstein

I’m pleased to see that Young Frankenstein has opened triumphantly in London in a significantly revised version from the less celebrated Broadway original. I’ve always loved the movie, which I saw in its original run, and a stage show seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately, the New York version, which I saw in previews almost precisely ten years ago (Oct 15, 2007), opened against impossible expectations in the wake of the same creative team’s phenomenally successful The Producers, and the producers did themselves no favors by announcing outrageous premium prices (then still a budding concept) before the show even opened. The reaction was perhaps inevitably less than hoped. And I have to say that the middling reception was justified. Continue reading →

Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

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  • Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

10/10/17 (Tues)

Add another exclamation point to Hello, Dolly! The NY Times reports that premium tickets to the mega-hit between now and the departure of superstar Bette Midler in January will go for an eye-popping $998. That “98” sounds like Walmart marking its prices just short of the next dollar mark, and it would be nice to think that the producers are embarrassed enough to want to avoid four figures. But we know, of course, that they don’t care a whit about what anyone thinks given the overwhelming demand and limited supply for their tickets (which will actually cost $1,009 with Ticketmaster’s usurious charges, reaching four figures anyway).

Once upon a time, the theater was at least nominally an egalitarian business: you stood in line, you got your tickets when your turn came around. You knew that everyone else in an orchestra seat paid the same as you did (other than perhaps discounted day seats). Black, white, male, female, American, foreign, tall, short: everyone had an equal chance at getting a ticket. Yes, scalpers always existed, and we all knew that the rich weren’t standing in any line for their tickets. But we could comfort ourselves with the knowledge that scalping at outrageous prices was at least illegal. Now it’s the producers themselves who are charging those prices, claiming that they’re being deprived of all that illegal money. Got it? Instead of finding ways to prevent illegitimate activity, they’ve simply made it legitimate.

They have every right to do so, of course; no one is forcing the public to buy tickets, and allowing supply/demand to determine prices is the very basis of capitalism. The limited supply of tickets has to be allocated somehow, and doing that through pricing is no less legitimate than through first-come, first-served, i.e., time vs. money. What that means in real life, though, is that like elsewhere in our society, the rich go to the front of the ticket line, and you, the not-rich, go to the back. The theatrical community no longer even pretends to be treating everyone equally. Fair enough. But when the largely left-of-center Broadway community goes on about diversity and the poor and undocumented immigrants and all that, their words ring awfully hollow.

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Taira Jo: The Blind Minstrel Orin (はなれ瞽女おりん)

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  • Taira Jo: はなれ瞽女おりん (The Blind Minstrel Orin)

10/1/17 (Sun), New National Theatre, Tokyo

The eclectic puppeteer Taira Jo is back with a series of three adult-oriented shows performed over three days. All the dramas highlight women, making for a theme of sorts, though that’s the only thing in common among them. Yesterday was Medea, a revival of the excellent production I saw some years back, and tomorrow is a piece by the aggressively avant-garde Terayama Shuji. Today’s sounded like a safer bet. This story was originally a 1974 play, which was novelized the following year and made into a film by Shinoda Masahiro in 1977 under the name “Ballad of Orin”, which I have not seen. Taira again played all the roles, helped by three hooded kurogo stagehands.

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Prince of Broadway: Wish List

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Reviewing Prince of Broadway in Tokyo a few years back, I had made some suggestions on how the creators might have approached the material. I had been hoping for interesting tidbits on the art of producing/directing or even backstage stories rather than just random songs in their original stagings. Harold Prince wanted to present the “arc” of his shows by staging representative numbers, but setting aside whether that’s even possible, that’s not what we got, at least in Tokyo (does “The Ladies Who Lunch” really show the arc of Company, for example?).  And it’s not necessarily what we wanted.

With the show on Broadway now (apparently in much the same format), I’ve been asked — challenged, really — to elaborate. I like a dare, so here are a few examples of the kind of show I would have liked to have seen. I don’t pretend to be a writer – I took these from vague recollections of articles and interviews with a few quotes thrown in and made up most of the rest – but I wasn’t as interested in the details as in conveying the general concept. Hopefully it will get the point across.

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Kabuki: Hade Kurabe Ise Monogatari (競伊勢物語)

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  • Kabuki: 競伊勢物語 (Hade Kurabe Ise Monogatari)

9/15/15 (Tues), Kabukiza

Hade Kurabe Ise Monogatari (A Colorful Rivalry: Tales of Ise) is another convoluted but entertaining piece by Nagawa Kamesuke, the same guy who wrote the classic Meiboku Sendai Hagi (which is playing in the afternoon). The program noted that this is the 1,200th anniversary of the birth of one of the show’s main characters, Ki no Aritsune.

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