Nobuko Tanaka is a stage writer who has regularly contributed contemporary theater and dance articles to The Japan Times since 2001. She also writes for several Japanese and overseas magazines and web sites. As a promoter, she takes Japanese artists to foreign theater festivals.
For Nobuko Tanaka's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Why are thespians the world over so drawn to "Waiting for Godot," that for many older actors playing one of its leads is as much a matter of professional pride as playing Hamlet is for younger ones? And why, in a poll by the U.K.'s ...
As a concept, "if" may be mere conjecture in real life. In fact, though, if Stuart Sutcliffe hadn't taken his best friend John Lennon's advice back in 1960 and left art school to play bass guitar in his band, the music world would now ...
With praise for his "Hamlet" with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2016 still ringing in his ears — and the plum job of artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C. awaiting him in August — Simon Godwin is an undoubted darling ...
Tom Stoppard is one of the most influential figures in theater today and one of the most internationally performed postwar dramatists. Both his 1966 Tony-winning absurdist tragicomedy "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," featuring minor characters from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and his time- and space-spanning masterpiece "Arcadia," ...
For many people, the mention of kabuki brings to mind images of exaggerated makeup on actors' white-painted faces, beautiful kimono costumes and colorful sets with dramatic backdrops. Then there are the distinctive standardized movements; classic poses (mie) expressing certain emotions; the precisely choreographed fights and ...
"I believe people with almost any kind of physique can do contemporary dance. Yet though there are many courses for able-bodied people, there is almost nothing for people with disabilities," says Sho Shibata, executive producer of U.K.-based Stopgap Dance Company. Stopgap's debut Japan tour with ...
A new opera based on the quintessentially Japanese novel "Kinkakuji" is set to open in Tokyo following a premiere held not in Kyoto, where the famed golden pavilion of its title is to be found, but at the Opera National du Rhin in Strasbourg, ...
Students and stage fans will see whether a hastily arranged series of performances of Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera" this weekend can break a decades-long standoff over the closure of Japan's oldest student dormitory: the wooden Yoshida ryō (Yoshida Dormitory) at Kyoto University. The Japanese-style ...
Whether it's regular theater that gets you going these days — or you're skipping along more to musicals — as 2019's curtains rise, variety will be the spice of live stages this coming year. In the realm of musicals, American composer Dave Malloy's 2012 "electropop ...
In a scoop for Tokyo, Theatre Cocoon in Shibuya Ward is set to mark the new year with the world premiere of a new production of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" in an original production by English director Phillip Breen with a ...
