Tuesday 13 July 2010

Kinky Kinki Sunday Part 1

We arose early to the dim and cloud of Sunday morning. Our bus to Osaka was at 7.30, which is an hour earlier than I have to get to school on work days. After witnessing a dog sexually assaulting a cat while its owner looked on, we headed off to the station and jumped on the bus.

Our trip's primary purpose was to fulfil a wish I'd been carrying around for over a year and had all but given up on until Miss Wildricefield, who sits beside me at Tokusho, sent me an email last Tuesday. The wish was to see a show by one of Japan's famous all-female Takarazuka troupes, and this teacher had some going spare. The show was Romeo and Juliet, and if you've ever wondered what that might look like without the men, then do so no longer:
The one on the left is Romeo, in case you were wondering. The smaller picture at the bottom right is Tybalt.

The production in question was a Japanese translation of a 2001 French musical called Roméo et Juliette: de la Haine à l'Amour. I'd never heard of it before, not being up on my contemporary French theatre. In a sense the performance promised two firsts; my first exposure to this musical, and my first chance to see grown ladies dressed as boys dance around and sing.

When we queued up at the Umeda Arts Theatre to get our tickets, we noticed a large posse of young to middle-aged women wearing green and white striped scarves. Leaving Emily in line (we were told only the person with the exchange pass should stand in line, as they were running out of space), I wandered off to the side where the side door was, and found all the girls with their scarves lined up beside the road in an orderly fashion. A short while later, one of the actresses showed up and was politely applauded by the crowd, and some took photographs. There was no stampede for autographs or physical contact. It was all very orderly and proper. Later, Emily told me about the wikipedia article on Takarazuka, which describes this kind of thing in the "Fan Clubs" section. It's always satisfying when you witness a textbook social phenomenon, especially when you didn't go looking for it.

Anyways, we grabbed some choco cro (Saint Marc Cafe...great chocolate croissants) as a kind of brunch before the performance. I grabbed a program, which is full of nice shiny pictures of ladies dressed as boys, and we took our seats. Eventually, this appeared:
A little later, there was some VO narration, then characters representing "The Poet" and "Death" started dancing around, and the story began. The production was very impressive. Pieces of set representing various streets would revolve around the stage to reveal Juliet's balcony or Friar Lawrence's chapel. The two families' colour-coded costumes - Montagues in blue, Capulets in Red - were stunning, and made the big group dance numbers all the more dazzling. The female stars, as you would expect, were adept at conveying masculinity, or at least what passes for masculinity in the realm of Japanese popular entertainment. It wasn't difficult at all to suspend disbelief over the characters' genders, even though the only physical difference between the male and female parts was that the men were the only ones wearing trousers.

Despite my great respect for the production as a whole, for me it was the music that let the show down. I was optimistic at the outset after the first song, "Verona" (English version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVylzWbJlZs) but with the exception of a few other group numbers, I was disappointed at the repetitive whiney tone of the musical numbers. It seemed that every character had to have his or her own solo, whether their own actions impacted greatly on the plot or not. Most of the time it seemed that they were just singing about how they felt about what was going on with everyone else. It would have made as much sense if I'd gone up on stage and started singing about how I didn't have enough leg room and that I wanted to stretch my legs. A lot of the time I just wanted some dialogue to break the monotony, but all too often there was only one line between songs, or none at all. Seriously, this musical has more songs in one act than most English musicals do in the whole show.

I did say there were a few songs that I did enjoy, so I thought I'd make mention of them so I don't come across as a negative nancy. The scene of the Ball where Romeo meets Juliet had good music that was a mix of modern and traditional that everyone danced to while Juliet tried to escape Paris, and the Montagues evaded Paris. Perhaps the best song, however, was "Kings of the World", sung by the Montagues in the first act. Here is the original French version:




More Sunday action to come.

No comments: