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 opera," "Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812," is running through Jan. 27 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre (TMET) in Ikebukuro.
For its first production outside the United States since a casting disagreement ended its Broadway run after some 360 shows, this adaptation of part of Leo Tolstoy's epic 1867 novel "War and Peace" features Erika Ikuta, a young veteran musical theater actress and member of the female idol pop group Nogizaka46, and leading musical theater actor Yoshio Inoue, in the title roles of aristocrats Natasha and Pierre.