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:
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 ...
Musicals have flourished in 2018, with many young stars also helping to sell out straight plays in which they appeared. However, the contemporary drama scene in Japan has been unusually quiet this year in terms of new works and writers. It is fitting that Keita ...
It has been almost two years since pop group SMAP split up, but its demise after over two decades at the forefront of entertainment in Japan is still fresh in everyone's memory. For theater lovers, though, what's great is that three of SMAP's five former ...
In one bound, the rising English director Jonathan Munby found himself in the spotlight of Britain's theater scene in 2017 when his smash-hit production of "King Lear," with Sir Ian McKellen in the title role, transferred straight from the rural Chichester Festival Theatre to ...
