The Rat Burglar (鼠小僧)

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  • Kabuki: 鼠小僧  (The Rat Burglar)

3/6/15 (Fri), film

I managed to get myself switched to an All Nippon Airways flight to New York when my United flight was suddenly cancelled. One advantage was a good selection of Japanese films, and I was surprised to see some Kabuki selections. I had avoided this particular 2003 production before since I didn’t want to spend money on Noda Hideki, who wrote and directed it. But it was a big hit, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to know what was out there. And at free, the price was right.  Continue reading →

Kabuki: Bancho Sarayashiki, Kurozuka (番町皿屋敷, 黒塚 )

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  • Kabuki: 番町皿屋敷, 女暫、黒塚 (Bancho Sarayashiki, Onna Shibaraku, Kurozuka)

1/16/15 (Fri), Tokyo

Bancho Sarayashiki is based on a famous ghost story where the evil samurai Aoyama Harima, having been rejected by his young servant Okiku, tricks her into thinking that she has lost one of the family’s ten valuable Korean dishes, a capital crime. She frantically counts over and over, but only finds nine. He then murders her and throws her down a well. She comes back as a ghost to haunt him, always counting up to nine and then shrieking. That story was evidently adapted into Bunraku puppet theater, where the cruelty factor was upped considerably, and that version was then turned into a short-lived Kabuki piece.

The version this month, though, is a New Kabuki adaptation by Okamoto Kido in 1916, which takes a significantly different approach to the ghost story – for one thing, it has no ghosts. Continue reading →

Concert: Buena Vista Social Club

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  • Concert: Buena Vista Social Club

1/1/15 (Thurs), Havana

There were several venues advertising shows with BVSC members, who seem to form a large but loose group of son/salsa musicians. These shows have boomed since my last visit 15 years ago, maybe a sign of the expanding tourist trade. Locals didn’t know much about it, so I asked the hotel, which recommended this one. I had imagined a small, smoky, dodgy club, and the location, a decidedly un-touristy and yet-to-be renovated part of the old city, felt appropriate. But the theater was actually quite new and more like a fancy nightclub, with a large proscenium stage and runway. Dinners and snacks were available along with drinks, all of which were served throughout the show by waitresses in retro short lacy skirts.  Continue reading →

Tel Aviv: Kazablan, Cabaret

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  • Kazablan, 11/15/14 (Sat), Cameri
  • Cabaret, 11/16/14 (Sun), Cameri

I didn’t look at the theater columns until a few days after arriving in Tel Aviv, and realized too late that I had missed a Hebrew version of Fiddler on the Roof. Drats. It only played 2-3 performances before making way for the next show, which sounds like a waste of a lot of rehearsals (presumably they keep the sets in stock). Anyway, I wanted to see something Israeli, and the next weekend offered a show called Kazablan, a 1966 musical based on a play and movie – not Casablanca, but a 1954 Israeli play and its highly popular 1964 screen adaptation about a kid of Moroccan heritage struggling to fit into Israeli society. It was performed in Hebrew with English subtitles. I’d never heard of it, but I was evidently the only one judging from the reactions of all the Israelis I talked to. So it seemed a good choice.  Continue reading →

London (Nov 2014)

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  • ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, 11/2/14 (Sun), Globe
  • King Charles III, 11/3/14 (Mon), West End
  • The Marriage of Figaro, 11/4/14 (Tues), ENO
  • Great Britain, 11/5/14 (Wed), West End
  • East is East, 11/6/14 (Thurs), West End
  • The Play That Goes Wrong, 11/6/14 (Thurs), West End
  • Miss Saigon, 11/7/14 (Fri), West End

Continue reading →

On The Town (オン・ザ・タウン)

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オン・ザ・タウン (On The Town)

9/28/14 (Sun), Tokyo

At long last, On The Town reached Japan. It featured three pop stars from the super-popular music group V6 (managed by the legendary Johnny’s Office), which was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the show’s success was ensured from the minute it was announced: apparently, getting three of these guys together for this period of time is a near miracle given their sundry activities individually and as a group, and the show was sold out for the entire run before it even opened. So commercially this was a gold mine. On the other hand, this was clearly a Johnny’s crowd, with an audience that was 95% young and female. I haven’t seen such a female-heavy auditorium since Takarazuka. There was no room whatsoever for fans of Broadway musicals who may have wanted to see this Bernstein classic for the first time. It didn’t matter to this audience what they were seeing as long as their idols were there. So it pretty much establishes this show as a star vehicle, a very different approach from the US. Whether it will enter the repertory, and whether anyone would risk doing it now with normal musical actors, is an open question. Continue reading →

Noh: Tsunemasa (経政)

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Noh: 経政 (Tsunemasa)

9/14/14 (Sun), Karasumori Hachiman Shrine

This was an evening show being performed at a neighborhood shrine as part of an annual festival. I had hoped for candlelight rather than artificial lighting, especially since it’s called for in this case in the script itself, but I guess fire laws (and common sense on a wooden stage) prevailed.  Continue reading →