Sitting in an interview room at the Bunkamura cultural complex in Tokyo's Shibuya district, María Pagés leans forward, smiles and tells me: "Flamenco is my language."

If anyone understands the truth in the phrase, “It doesn’t hurt to ask” — it’s Alexandra Rutter. The 23-year-old cofounder and artistic director of Whole Hog Theatre (WHT) is also the director of the first-ever adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 anime masterpiece, “Princess Mononoke.” ...

Ask your average Japanese person or non-native Japanophile to name a “traditional” form of domestic theater and the classics such as kabuki and noh would feature prominently.

Ahead of their current Taiwan tour, Yuzuki Reon, the current top otokoyaku (male-role actress) with the Takarazuka Revue, took time out between rehearsals at the city-center Tokyo Takarazuka Theater to share with readers of The Japan Times something of her view from such a ...

Always keen to break new ground, Keiko Miyata, artistic director of the New National Theatre Tokyo (NNTT), has created a series titled “With: linking theater” as the centerpiece of this season’s program. In this, she has lined up three appetizing collaborations by asking playwrights ...

“If I thought too much about my future plans, I would kind of get stuck,” says Natsumi Abe. “So I just try to concentrate on the next day’s work and do it as well as I can.” It’s a serious statement on work ethic, ...

The Kabukiza is back — with big ambitions and aspirations to make the nation’s classical theatrical entertainment more attractive to a 21st-century audience. The reopened kabuki theater — now reconstructed for the fifth time — in the upscale shopping-entertainment district of Ginza, will roll ...

“Sumidagawa Hana no Goshozome” (“The Sumida River Adorned with Cherry Blossoms”) by Tsuruya Namboku IV (1755-1829), now showing at the National Theater of Japan, was written to be a blockbuster. It was created for the Ichimura-za theater in Edo in 1814, when kabuki was ...

If you had a son or daughter who announced they wanted to be a stage actor, whatever would you say to them? In Japan today, as in centuries past, this still remains a dreaded scenario for many “respectable” parents hoping to raise children who ...

Without doubt, Takahiro Fujita is the most prominent newcomer in the world of Japanese contemporary theater. To a considerable extent that’s because the 27-year-old playwright/director has an unusual trademark style — to create works that often have the same lyrical phrases and series of ...

A play about William Adams, thought to be the first Englishman to set foot in Japan, is being staged in London to mark the start of J400, a yearlong series of events to celebrate 400 years of Anglo-Japanese relations. “Anjin: The Shogun and the ...