As an Honorary Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, John Caird may be one of the leading pillars of the English theater establishment, but in a recent interview with The Japan Times, this acclaimed director of plays, musicals and opera declared, “In a sense, some part of me is ...
Street dance has been growing in popularity for years among younger generations in “Cool Japan,” with displays often attracting crowds ...
The 101-year-old all-female Takarazuka Revue company is currently staging a double bill of “Like a Black Panther” and “Dear Diamond!!” ...
“Ballet must be accessible,” the French choreographer and artistic director of The Ballet of Monte Carlo, Jean-Christophe Maillot, believes — and the upcoming Japan premiere of “LAC,” his most ambitious reconfiguration of a classic to date, promises to attract both fans of Tchaikovsky’s famed ...
French comedian extraordinaire Guillaume Gallienne has a sizeable Japanese fan base, which gratifies him most heartily. “I feel like the Japanese get me and vice versa — and at one time, I thought I’d even make my home here,” the 42-year-old performer/filmmaker said in ...
“Looking at my last 15 years’ work, I see it as a series of excitements,” Tetsuya Kumakawa told The Japan Times. Now 42, the Hokkaido native was in the prime of his dance life in 1999 when he left his position as a much-loved ...
After the premiere of “Mercury Fur” at Theatre Tram in Tokyo’s lively Sangenjaya district this month, Issey Takahashi, who stars in that dystopian 2005 play by Philip Ridley, declared: “I think this is a very dark prophecy, but as I was acting my character ...
Built to commemorate the International Year of the Child in 1979, and opened in 1985, the marvelous National Children’s Castle (Kodomo no Shiro) arts and sports facility in Tokyo’s central Shibuya district was closed this month — along with the 1,200-seat Aoyama Theatre and ...
Playwright and director Go Aoki is one of today’s many leading dramatists who emerged through the shōgekijō (small-scale youth theater) movement of the 1980s-2000s Though he founded his theater troupe Gring in 1997, and with it specialized in detailed and realistic conversational plays, he ...
The title of Yudai Kamisato’s new work “+51 Aviacíon, San Borja” references his grandmother’s address in Lima and the international telephone dialling code of Peru — but that only hints at the unusually cosmopolitan background of this 32-year-old Japanese playwright and director who also ...
Like many others in Japan’s rising performing-artist generation, 34-year-old Ney Hasegawa says he first felt the lure of the stage when he went to see shōgekijō (small-scale youth theater) plays while he was in high school. After that, he started taking an interest in ...
Actress Kayoko Shiraishi is famed for her portrayals of male and female characters of all ages almost as if she were possessed by their souls. Last year in October, however, she left legions of fans lamenting when, after 22 years, she finally completed her ...
“In my free time when I’m not taking classes or conducting rehearsals, I like to go to theaters and museums — or just go shopping and visit different parts of the city,” Vladimir Malakhov, The Tokyo Ballet’s new artistic adviser explained during our recent ...
Yukio Ninagawa’s “cherry-blossom” staging of “Macbeth” at the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, with actors in that famously Scottish play sporting kimono rather than kilts, was a sensation due to its radical reimagining of so revered a work. Since then, the 79-year-old director’s uniquely visual ...
Over the past decade, Shintaro Mori has made a name for himself in Japan’s theater world as a director with a passion for plays in translation. So, true to form, next month at the ACM Theater in Art Tower Mito he is staging a ...
