It's 9:15 on a cold and rainy Saturday morning, and Wendell Harrison is running late. "The one day I send an email telling them not to be late, and I'm the one having problems," he laments.
Harrison's doing double duty at the moment: directing a production of "Romeo and Juliet" by the Tokyo International Players, Tokyo's oldest foreign theater group, and running the first half of TIP Youth's four-hour Saturday rehearsal.
His charges, a group of 20 enthusiastic 8- to-12-year-olds, started arriving at 8:45. Within minutes they were singing along with the pop music playing over the rehearsal space's speakers, chatting, hugging and dancing together.