Fiddler on the Roof (屋根の上のヴァイオリン弾き)

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Archives:「屋根の上のヴァイオリン弾き」(Fiddler on the Roof)

27 February 2006 (Mon), Tokyo

Much-revived Japanese-language version of the Broadway hit. Ichimura Masachika takes over as the fourth Tevye, a role still associated with the definitive Morishige Hisaya (who I saw 20 years ago). I remember Morishige as a gruff, commanding presence who pretty much molded the part to his own personality, not so much acting Tevye as simply playing himself. It worked perfectly in the Japanese context, which is more like a family drama than a broader tale of how to preserve tradition in a changing world. Continue reading →

Persona Non Grata: The Chiune Sugihara Story

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Persona Non Grata: The Chiune Sugihara Story  (杉原千畝)

20 November 2015 (Fri), Tokyo cinema

I coincidentally happened to be reading about Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who saved thousands of Jewish refugees during the war, so the film caught my eye. Sugihara’s story has been dramatized before, but this was a major Toho release that is obviously being aimed at foreign markets; for one thing, it’s directed by an American, albeit a half-Japanese guy born in Japan, and a good part of it is in English. The clips I’ve seen of previous stagings (Japanese TV drama, Australian play) were long on the melodrama, which the story lends itself to in lesser hands. That made me wary of another version. But a friend was so effusive in her praise that it raised my hopes. Continue reading →

Gion Bayashi (祇園囃子)

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Gion Bayashi (祇園囃子)

14 November 2015 (Sat), DVD

A Mizoguchi film about the plight of women after the war, as usual, but painted on an intimate canvas. A girl who has been subject to the loss of her mother, abandonment by her father and abuse by her uncle goes in desperation to the mother’s old geisha house and begs to be trained as a maiko, her only hope for survival. The geisha, whose lack of a patron makes her financially unstable, hesitates to take on the high cost of a trainee, but eventually gives in, borrowing the necessary money from a powerful madam in Gion. After a long apprenticeship, the girl makes her appearance as a maiko, but her ideals quickly meet reality when she discovers what the men are really after. Her refusal to give in – she nearly bites an important client’s tongue off – forces her mistress, bound financially to the madam, into a difficult decision. Continue reading →

Othello (NT Live)

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Othello (National Theatre Live)

19 October 2015 (Mon), Tokyo cinema

I loved Adrian Lester a few years back in Red Velvet as a 19th-century actor playing Othello, so I wasn’t going to miss him in the real thing. With direction by Nicholas Hytner and the added attraction of Rory Kinnear as Iago, my expectations were high.  Continue reading →

Victim

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Victim

11 October 2015, YouTube

An amazing British film from 1961 about a secretly gay magistrate who pursues a gay blackmail case at the his risk of his own outing. And that’s back when homosexuality was a criminal offense in the UK. I imagine this was pretty controversial in its day, especially as it questions a widely held view and basically advocates that the law be rescinded. But aside from the politics, the story is a taut thriller that works very well on its own terms. Continue reading →

Needles and Opium

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Needles and Opium

10 October 2015 (Sat), Tokyo

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). Continue reading →

Ninagawa Macbeth

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Ninagawa Macbeth

2 October 2015 (Fri), Tokyo

I had seen this production maybe 20 years earlier but, with only the vaguest memory of it now, I immediately said yes when a friend suggested going. This is Ninagawa’s revival of his first version of the show, the one that put him on the map internationally. The run was completely sold out before it opened on the strength of its considerable reputation, and my friend fortunately moved quickly when they announced an extra show. Continue reading →

Mary Poppins (stage version)

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Mary Poppins

13 September 2005 (Tue), London West End

Mary Poppins is a mess. This is a British version of the sunny Disney movie musical of the 1960s. That film, of course, was based on a series of English novels dealing with an English nanny in an English family living in Edwardian London, and used mainly a British cast. The movie, with its spoonfuls of sugar and jolly holidays, is said to have diverged widely from its source material to create what is essentially an American version of jolly olde England. The original novels were evidently somewhat bleaker in their treatment of the children and their family, so it would be true to say in this case that it is the Americans who distorted the material by unfairly lightening it up. (Indeed, the author of the books is said to have disapproved of the film’s misrepresentation of her work.) So I suppose the British have a right to reclaim the starker vision of the novels in the stage version. While the still-popular Disney film inevitably remained a primary source, Disney had to share producing credits with British mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh, who evidently owns the book rights and ensured that the stage show dipped generously into the novels themselves to reshape the look and feel of the musical and its characters. The creative staff was all-British, including a young composer-lyricist team who added a number of new songs to the familiar score. Yet there is still the lingering sweetness of those old sugary tunes. The question is how these two strands are reconciled. The answer is, not very well. Continue reading →

Prince of Broadway

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Prince of Broadway

23 October 2015 (Fri), Tokyo

Harold Prince has apparently been shopping around the idea of a retrospective of his life on Broadway for years without much success. The plan was to feature samples from his amazingly varied 60-year career not, I had understood, as a song-by-song compilation like Jerome Robbins Broadway but as something brand new that would provide a different perspective on the shows and a broad idea of what it means when the name Harold Prince is on the marquee. He’s got quite a list to choose from: he’s been responsible for some of the most iconic musicals in the history of Broadway, and his contribution to the development of the art form either as producer or director is immense. But backers were understandably wary. It’s a lot easier to understand a show centered on a choreographer or songwriter or performer than on a director, whose input is not as obvious. A Prince recap seemed a fantastic chance to give the rest of us an idea of what the director’s function actually is, though I’m not sure if that would be so interesting to anyone other than us musical freaks. Continue reading →

Hello world!

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Theater-lover from Japan. A friend suggested that I post my reviews and thoughts online, so here they are. I’m not sure how to separate my latest posts from my archives — I’m new to blogging — so the timeline might be a bit confusing. Hope to work that out. Thanks for reading.