Swords and slapstick

Young blades: Tatsuya Fujiwara (left) in the title role of Hisashi Inoue's long-awaited "Musashi" and Shun Oguri as his rival, Kojiro Sasaki HORIPRO

Swords and slapstick Injecting some humor into the gory tale of Musashi

By NOBUKO TANAKA
Special to The Japan Times

In Los Angeles last week, the showdown in the World Baseball Classic between Japan’s “Samurai” and their South Korean rivals had TV audiences gripped. So, too, were those at Saitama Arts Theater, who witnessed an acting duel between 26-year-olds Tatsuya Fujiwara and Shun Oguri in “Musashi,” a hilarious samurai sword-fighting tale directed by the theater’s resident dramatist, Yukio Ninagawa.

Written by Hisashi Inoue, former president of the Japan Pen Club, “Musashi” is led by the performances of these two, both Ninagawa favorites. Fujiwara made his career debut aged 15 at the Barbican in London in Ninagawa’s production of “Shintokumaru (by Shuji Terayama),” while Oguri performed for English audiences in 2006 with a role in Ninagawa’s version of “Titus Andronicus” at Stratford-upon-Avon in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Complete Works” festival.

Having last shared a stage in 2003 in Ninagawa’s “Hamlet,” when Fujiwara played Hamlet and Oguri was Fortinbras, the two young blades cross swords again in a work based on the life of the wandering samurai swordsman Musashi Miyamoto (1584-1645) and his famous encounter in 1612, the Duel of Ganryu Island with a rival, Kojiro Sasaki (1585-1612?).

The curtain rises at the climactic moment of the duel as the rivals — Fujiwara in the title role and Oguri as Sasaki — stare at each other against the backdrop of a setting sun. In a scene revisited in countless Japanese works of fiction, TV and film dramas, anime and manga, Musashi fells Kojiro on a beach, before the stage is plunged into darkness.

Rather than flashing back to what led to this moment, though, Inoue draws on something he noticed in “Musashi” by Eiji Yoshikawa, the definitive historical novel of the samurai’s life that was serialized in the Asahi newspaper from 1935 till 1939; the book never says that Kojiro died, only that Musashi is left standing over him, finding “there was still a trace of breath,” and thinking to himself, “with the right treatment he may recover.”

Thus in Inoue’s “Musashi,” Musashi and Kojiro meet again six years later at a Zen temple in Kamakura. The 74-year old Inoue says his version of the play has been more than 20 years in the making. Takeo Hori, the 76-year-old founder and head of the theatrical production company Horipro, asked him to write a Broadway musical version of the Musashi story for him in 1985. Inoue didn’t get it done in time for production, though, and only recently has come back to the theme.

So why revisit it now?

“Recently I’ve become aware that I might die tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow?” Inoue says. “It could happen to me anytime. But then I remembered that I can’t die before I complete ‘Musashi,’ because I felt bad about letting Hori-san down after he worked so hard to stage it on Broadway.

“So I called him up and told him I would write it for him now. If he didn’t like it or want it, then he was free to throw it into the bin.”

Like the second meeting of the old foes Musashi and Kojiro at that Kamakura temple, Inoue’s intriguing “Musashi” was worth waiting for. Upon meeting again, Kojiro challenges Musashi to a duel in three days’ time. Both of them stay at the temple, each meditating deeply on how to kill the other. It’s a fascinating meaning-of-life scenario that Inoue invests with side-splitting humor to craft a powerful, life-affirming message.

As for performances, it is difficult to say whether Fujiwara or Oguri comes out on top in the battle, and the dramatic tension between them keeps the whole play taut while the other cast members, including veteran actors Kazunaga Tsuji and Kotaro Yoshida, draw plenty of laughs with their physical acting. Although the question of which of these two brilliant samurai is going to prevail is absorbing, eventually it is each character’s distinct humanity that is most compelling. “Musashi” runs an improbably speedy 3 1/2 hours, and Horipro hopes to take the play to England in 2010.

“Musashi” runs till April 19 at the Saitama Arts Theater, an 8-minute walk from JR Yonohonmachi Station on the Saikyo Line. It then travels to Umeda Arts Theater: Theater Drama City in Osaka, showing April 25-May 10. For more details, call (03) 3490-4949 or visit hpot.jp

Source: Japantimes.co.jp

‘Shintoku-Maru’: At a Loss for Words

By Peter Marks

Among the adventurous conjurers of stage pictures, Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa surely ranks as world-class. The eerie sight of the conflicted young hero of “Shintoku-Maru” wandering an underworld of wagon-size boats, crowded with candles and what look like jellyfish dangling from long poles, speaks hauntingly in the universally incongruous language of tortured sleep.

Ninagawa’s estimable gift for spectacle is on display through tonight at the Kennedy Center in the U.S. premiere of the slightly uneven “Shintoku-Maru,” an adaptation by Rio Kishida of Shuji Terayama’s play based on a centuries-old Japanese story. It’s fortunate that the venue for this opening act of the center’s Japan festival is the Opera House, because the scale and emotional intensity of the piece — bordering on the histrionic — puts you in mind of the mighty winds of grand opera.

I’d love to say that the visual dimension of “Shintoku-Maru” was enough, but a half-hour into the production, I found myself craving more information than I had access to. Because of the language barrier, the compact, 90-minute work at times lulls you into a state of woozy indifference. A rather esoteric decision was made by the director not to provide a running English translation of “Shintoku-Maru’s” dialogue scenes. The intention for non-Japanese speakers seems to be an unadulterated immersion in Ninagawa’s refined design elements.

In some productions, words might indeed be secondary. (As a leftover from a presentation of the piece in London a decade ago, British actor Alan Rickman recorded a plot synopsis that is played before the show over the public-address system.) The fabric of “Shintoku-Maru,” however, is of some psychological complexity, and the protracted scenes in which the teenage Shintoku-Maru (Tatsuya Fujiwara) vents his feelings or engages in battles of will with his stepmother-to-be, Nadeshiko (Kayoko Shiraishi), cry out for the explication that much of an American audience is denied.

The melding in “Shintoku-Maru” of ways ancient and contemporary could also be felt more profoundly if we were more fully apprised of what was going on. The play documents the mixture of revulsion and sexual attraction that wells up in the young man upon the arrival of Nadeshiko, who’s been purchased by his father (Toru Shinagawa) as a replacement for his dead wife.

The scene of Nadeshiko’s selection from among a pool of available women (the program says they are “traveling players who have fallen on hard times”) is especially weird and wonderful. A wooden structure divided into stalls is wheeled into place, each stall containing a middle-aged woman, in the garish abstract mask of a seal, performing a domestic chore. (The seal, the program tells us, connotes in Japanese lore a householder’s rights.)

You get in this moment a sense of both the mundane and the exotic that “Shintoku-Maru” traverses. The evening is framed by two mesmerizing sequences in which a Fellini-esque parade of midgets, clowns, vagabonds, souvenir-hawkers and dancers advances to the lip of the stage and then retreats. Somehow, the torment in Shintoku-Maru’s imagination is expressed in the melancholy, imagistic world in which these fringe personalities also dwell.

Ninagawa alternates scenes of remarkable fantasy with those outlining the blander rituals of domestic life; the work is playing here with the changing nature of the traditional Japanese family. An agile crew rolls out the numerous modular pieces that come together as the screened rooms of Shintoku-Maru’s house. They are later separated again, to become the rooms of the many other families of the city, any one of which looks happier to the boy than his own.

The production’s voracious leads, Fujiwara and Shiraishi, circle each other warily, lashing out and pulling back, wounding, consolingly. (The intense accompaniment of Akira Miyagawa’s score occasionally puts too much accent on the melodramatic.) In concert, though, with the outstanding lighting by Sumio Yoshii and sets by Nobutaka Kotake, Ninagawa and his stars go a long way toward giving color and definition to a world that remains just beyond our reach.

Shintoku-Maru, by Shuji Terayama. Adapted by Rio Kishida. Directed by Yukio Ninagawa. Costumes, Lily Komine; sound, Masahiro Inoue; choreography, Kiyomi Maeda, Kinnosuke Hanayagi. With Kohta Nakasone, Kenichi Ishii. About 90 minutes. Through tonight at the Kennedy Center. Call 202-467-4600 or visit http://www.kennedy-center.org.

source: Washingtonpost.com

Hypercolor Tragedy: Shintoku-Maru @ The KenCen

Man, I had the craziest hallucination last night. Thing is, about 2,000 other people had it, too, and to give due credit, it wasn’t really my hallucination. It was Yukio Ninagawa’s. The multi-Olivier-award winning director, who picked up a knighthood from Her Majesty’s Government in 2002 for his bold reinterpretations of the likes of Twelfth Night and Medea (making him, um, Sir Yukio, we guess), has brought his Shintoku-Maru to the Kennedy Center for a brief run as part of the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture festival.

Adapted from an ancient Japanese noh play, Shintoku-Maru seems to incorporate bits of most of the Greek tragedies you kind of remember, but most obviously Oedipus Rex, its mommy-lust reworked into the marginally less gross stepmommy-lust. (The eye-gouging, you will be relieved to hear, remains intact.)

Aside from these familiar elements, much of the story here would likely be impenetrable even if weren’t performed entirely in Japanese without projected subtitles, which it is. Mercifully, the program contains a detailed synopsis. And if that isn’t enough help, the performance is prefaced by an audio recording of Hans Gruber himself, actor Alan Rickman, reading the lengthy plot summary aloud. Bizarre but awesome, rather like the 85 minutes that follow.

As Hans Gruber tells it, Shintoku-Maru is despondent after the death of his mom. When his elderly father decides to buy himself a new wife, he chooses Nadeshiko, a woman to which Shintoku feels a powerful attraction. Making matters worse is the fact that Shintoku’s dad isn’t much interested in attending to Nadeshiko’s womanly needs, which only adds to the tension between Nadeshiko and Shintoku.

You can probably guess what happens next. Yes, that’s correct! Shintoku does indeed go visit a magician who sells him a portal to the underworld so he can go looking for his dead mom.

And this is the point at which things start to get a little weird.

Flummoxed? Don’t sweat it; the plot really is sort of secondary. The real news here are the arresting sets and costumes, and especially Nanagawa’s inimitable way of choreographing all these elements into a visual symphony of the grotesque. (There’s a display of the costumes in the lobby, so you can check ‘em out up close.)

The street scenes that bookend the show give us a sort of funeral parade of traveling players and mask-sellers and guys equipped with those metal-sander tools that seem to have no practical purpose other than to rain sparks for use in late-80s hair-band videos. It’s jaw-dropping. Musically, the show is the Japanese answer to Andrew Lloyd Webber: Grating, bombastic pseudo-rock without a trace of roll. We cannot tell a lie: To this pair of Western, Webber-hating ears, it sounds awful. But did we mention that it all looks spectacular?

Tatsuya Fujiwara, who plays the title role, has gone on to become a star in Japan since making his stage debut, at the age of 15, in Nanagawa’s 1997 London production of this show. Given the language barrier and the more histrionic acting style of the Japanese stage as compared to Western theater, I can’t really comment on his performance. But I will dutifully report that Timberlake-level squeals filled the KenCen Opera House when Fujiwara took his curtain call.

 By Chris Klimek.

Shintoku-Maru is at the Kennedy Center for three more performances only, tonight and tomorrow. Tickets are $15-$35 and can be purchased here. Get there as early as you can; the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture festival has lots of other amazing things to see.

Source: Dcist.com

Our Picks

SHINTOKU-MARU [ON STAGE] The Kennedy Center’s two-week celebration of Japanese arts, “Japan! Culture + Hyperculture,” has many noteworthy events, but if you’re going to experience just one, consider the American debut of award-winning director Yukio Ninagawa’s tragic love and revenge fable. This play, based on an ancient tale, features Tatsuya Fujiwara as a young man haunted by the memory of his dead mother yet drawn to his new stepmother. The performance is presented in Japanese without subtitles, but a detailed synopsis is in the program. A taped audio synopsis read by Alan Rickman will be played after everyone is seated.

Thursday-Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Kennedy Center Opera House, 2700 F St. NW. $15-$35. 202-467-4600 or 800-444-1324.

Source: Washingtonpost.com

The Rising Sun Comes Up Early

The Kennedy Center, which has in past years saluted Japan during flowering fruit-tree season, is readying a smorgasbord of the country’s culture. Notable within next month’s “Japan! Culture and Hyperculture” are the many stylistic alloys, fusing Eastern and Western; the traditional and the avant-garde; the artistic and the technological.

Alicia Adams, the Kennedy Center’s vice president for international programming, speaks of Japan as a locus of aesthetic “collision.” Kenji Matsumoto, who consulted on the festival from his post at the New York branch of the Japan Foundation, agrees. “Japanese culture is very hybrid,” he says, adding that, indeed, these days “there is no such thing as essentially Japanese culture — or essentially American culture — because we are living in an interconnected world.”

The festival, Feb. 5 to 17, will showcase 467 artists and a number of robots, and sample — among other fare — anime, 8-bit pop music, taiko drumming, top-spinning, manga, Mikimoto pearls, a kyogen “Comedy of Errors” and, yes, Midori.

Lending the proceedings an intermittently sci-fi feel will be the robots, who should feel at home in this showbiz venue. Tracing the lineage of such automatons back to the clockwork manikins of the Edo period, Tokyo-based scholar Timothy N. Hornyak, who served as the festival’s robotics adviser, says, “Robots have been, essentially, performing artists in Japan for centuries.”

Movie star Tatsuya Fujiwara adds extra glamour to a visually haunting production by Yukio Ninagawa, a director famed for his takes on Shakespeare. Experimental writer Shuji Terayama’s reworking of a noh play (a dance-drama genre), “Shintoku-Maru” broods on loss, lust and vengeance. Feb. 7-9 at 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 9 at 1:30 p.m. Opera House. Performed in Japanese. Tickets start at $15.

Source: Washingtonpost.com