笑の大学 & The Last Laugh

Posted on by

笑いの大学   (Warai no Daigaku) (DVD)

A 2005 film version of Mitani Koki’s most famous stage piece. I had never seen the show on stage, but will be seeing a British adaptation called The Last Laugh next week and wanted to catch a production in the original Japanese first. I’ve always had problems with Mitani Koki’s shows since they tend to be a bit contrived. The ones I’ve seen have all been elaborate farces with numerous quirky characters and complicated plots that all get tied up a bit too nicely in the end. I’ve always felt like he simply gives the characters the traits they need for his story or for a particular moment rather than creating natural human beings, and the stories themselves can be pretty artificial, though he does have a nice way of juggling multiple plot strands. I had been curious about this show since it only has two characters, a far cry from anything I’ve seen by him before, and the show next week was a good excuse to rent the movie. Continue reading →

Cocoon Kabuki: The Three Kichizas (三人吉三)

Posted on by

Cocoon Kabuki: 三人吉三  (Sannin Kichisa)

23 June 2007 (Sat), Tokyo

My third straight year to see Kanzaburo’s annual Cocoon Kabuki series in Shibuya’s Theater Cocoon, which turns away from the overly reverent traditional staging of Kabuki classics in an effort to bring back the raucous atmosphere of the old Edo Era days. This year was Mokuami’s venerable 1860 drama Sannin Kichisa, which I’d seen a few times in the past. It’s a much-revived show, especially the scene along the river when the three Kichisas meet, and includes some of the most famous speeches and set pieces in all of Kabuki. It seems a good choice for the Cocoon series given its populist touch and the grotesquery of certain of its characters. The show was as usual sold out, but I managed to get a couple of seats on the floor right next to the makeshift hanamichi. I guess it was an authentic way to watch Kabuki and not as crippling as I had imagined, but I think I’d rather spend the three-hours-plus on a chair. Continue reading →

Porgy and Bess

Posted on by

Archives: Porgy and Bess

26 April 2007 (Tues), West End

The opera performed as a musical, directed by Trevor Nunn. The story was reworked and all the recitative turned into dialogue, and the show was given an eight-performance-a- week run in the same way as any West End musical. It seemed a reasonable idea since the show is such a familiar name even to non-opera audiences, not to mention that wealth of famous jazz standards. I’d always found some of the recitative a bit long, so it made some sense from an artistic standpoint as well to try it out in a musical format. (Whether opera singers can hold up for eight performances is another question.) Generally I hate the idea of making things more “accessible”, since I would prefer to lift an audience up rather than to bring the show down. In this case, though, it seemed a justifiable effort.

But, as it turns out, it’s all in the execution. Continue reading →

On the Town (ENO)

Posted on by

On the Town

23 April 2007 (Mon), ENO

A revival of ENO’s well-received production from last year. With an orchestra of 66 and a cast of 40-something, this was a major staging on a scale pretty much impossible in a Broadway theatre. (The ticket price reflected this at ￡76 or around $150.) The cast was a mixture of opera singers, ballet dancers and Broadway/West End actors, and choreographed in a combination of Broadway and classical dance. I hadn’t actually seen the show since a fantastic production back in Washington D.C. in the 1980s, one of my most memorable theatrical experiences ever, so I was watching closely.

The production was as big and brash as anyone could want for the most part, but there was a decisive shift in point of view that was a bit disconcerting if not entirely surprising. As usual with British productions of Broadway musical classics, the director imposed a “darker” vision on the material. Continue reading →

Follies (Encores!)

Posted on by

Archives: Follies

10 February 2007 (Sat), Encores!

The opening show of the 2007 Encores! season, which is saluting the Ziegfeld Follies-type format. I wouldn’t have thought that Follies is a show that they would have chosen, since it’s still commercially produced – including two major productions within the last 4-5 years at Paper Mill and on Broadway – and thus hardly lost or forgotten. But the production has apparently generated the biggest response in the history of the Encores! series, and they actually had to add an extra performance on Monday, a first, in order to accommodate the crowds. I hadn’t seen Follies since the mid-1980s London production, which I remember only as being confusing. But given the show’s near-legendary status, the buzz surrounding this production (including a fantastic NY Times review) and the star-filled cast, it was hard not to be excited. Continue reading →

Genroku Minato Uta (元禄港歌)

Posted on by

元禄港歌 (Genroku Minato Uta)

7 January 2015 (Thurs), Tokyo

Revival of a Ninagawa hit from 1980, written by his frequent collaborator Akimoto Matsuyo. It was a tough ticket to get on the reputation of both the show and Ninagawa’s over-the-top production as well as the starry cast, including Ennosuke and Miyazawa Rie as the two main women. I managed after much searching to find two seats on the internet. It’s strange that there’s no mechanism for extending the runs of clearly popular hits like this, though I suppose Ennosuke in particular must be hard to lock down given his Kabuki commitments (the show also travels to Osaka for a limited run). With the huge cast and elaborate sets, I wonder how they make money in this medium-sized theater for just a three-week run. Continue reading →

Atami Murder Mystery (熱海殺人事件)

Posted on by

熱海殺人事件 (Atami Satsujin Jiken)

24 December 2015 (Thurs), Tokyo

An extremely difficult ticket to get because of the pairing of veterans Hirata Mitsuru and Kazama Morio in this 1974 work for the first time in 33 years. They’ve always been linked in my mind because of their go-for-broke performances in the film of Tsuka Kohei’s other classic Kamata Koshinkyoku (蒲田行進曲) in the early 1980s (winning Japan Academy Awards for best actor and supporting actor in the process), and they were key members of Tsuka’s troupe in its heyday. So I wasn’t going to miss this. Continue reading →

Waste

Posted on by

Waste

14 December 2015 (Mon), National Theatre

An early 20th-century play by Harley Granville Barker. An up-and-coming young politician eyed for a Cabinet post is working on bill to “disestablish” the Church of England, i.e., effectively separate church and state. He is irritated when his lover, a married woman, becomes pregnant; more so when she insists on having an abortion (he wants the child, in a reversal of the usual story); and yet more so when she ultimately commits suicide. But his conscience doesn’t seem to kick into gear until he is unceremoniously dumped by the party as the scandal mounts, which sets him into deep thinking and rash action. Continue reading →

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Posted on by

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

12 December 2015 (Sat), West End

My second chocolate factory this trip after Menier. I hadn’t bothered to see this in any of my previous trips but went along this time with a friend, figuring it would be harmless enough. I imagined that they would darken it, being British and all, and knew they had jettisoned the movie music for a new score. That score, though, was by the Hairspray team, which had me a bit hopeful. Continue reading →

Funny Girl

Posted on by

Funny Girl

11 December 2015 (Fri), Menier Chocolate Factory

This is the first big-time revival of the show since its initial run in the mid 1960s, meaning anyone who saw it as a teenager then would now be retirement age. The first question on anyone’s mind is: who’s going to play Barbra? Streisand’s long shadow over the role makes casting extremely tricky; the aborted attempt at a revival a few years ago in the US was to star a Streisand impersonator from Glee, which would have been a disaster – why get a second-hand Barbra instead of a first-rate something else? The situation applies as well to London, where Streisand repeated her success after her sensational Broadway run and just before the hugely popular movie. While it’s true the show ran for a year-and-a-half on Broadway after Streisand left (with the wonderful Mimi Hines), that was before Barbra became a legend and diva nonpareil with the film, to the extent that many people think that the show and songs were written specifically for her (they weren’t). I don’t think even Fanny Brice herself could be cast these days. So when tickets for the revival by the estimable Menier Chocolate Factory went on sale, the entire run was snapped up within 90 minutes by audiences curious to see the original musical and the actress who dared take on La Barbra. The show was announced for a West End transfer before it even opened, which signals a lot of confidence on the part of the producers. I managed with difficulty to snare a seat on a Friday night. Yeah, I was excited. Even this theater’s usual pitiful printed program didn’t dampen things.

The actress who sparked all the excitement was Sheridan Smith, a blonde British shiksa who’s about as far from a Jewish Brooklyn girl as high tea from gefilte fish. Even given the impressive range in her career – her two Oliviers are for Legally Blonde and Terence Rattigan’s wartime-era Flare Path­ – this one seemed a stretch. Still, the word was good, and I was ready for anything. Continue reading →

Pericles (Globe)

Posted on by

Pericles

11 December 2015 (Fri), Sam Wanamaker Theatre

This was the latest staging at the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Theatre, the first in a series exploring Shakespeare’s four late romances. I can see why this is a lesser known play. It skates perilously on the line between far-fetched and ridiculous: shipwrecks abound, a dead body in a trunk fished from the sea is revived, armor lost at sea washes up on the shore with perfect timing, Pericles miraculously discovers his long-lost daughter (presumed dead) who then discovers her own long-lost mother (also presumed dead), all of whom happen to have ended up on the same sparsely populated island. Shakespeare has never shied from allowing magic and coincidence to do his work for him, but he really got carried away in this one. Maybe that had to do with his collaborator; the excellent program says that George Wilkins wrote the first part and Shakespeare the final three acts. In any case, it led to unintended laughter in the audience in some scenes, such as when the dead woman awakens or when the long-separated family find themselves improbably reunited. It must be hard to say those lines with a straight face. Continue reading →