The Kabukiza Theater celebrates the advent of spring by offering an attractive selection of kabuki plays and dance numbers with excellent casts, including the two renowned onnagata, Nakamura Shikan and Bando Tamasaburo.
The afternoon program opens with "Ayatsuri Sanbaso," created in 1853 as a variation of the auspicious sanbaso dance. The performance of the sanbaso (Matsumoto Somegoro) imitates the movements of a puppet on strings and is accompanied by lively Nagauta music.
This is followed by "Ukifune (Floating Boat)," Hojo Hideji's 1953 New Kabuki drama based partly on the last 10 chapters of Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century romance, "The Tale of Genji." The program closes with the well-known dance drama "Kanjincho" (a kanjincho is a scroll recording the name of donors to a shrine or temple), one of the 18 famous kabuki plays created for Ichikawa Danjuro VII in 1840 and modeled after the noh play "Ataka." Matsumoto Koshiro, 60, gives a spirited performance as Benkei in the style established by his eminent grandfather Koshiro VII, who played Benkei 1,600 times.