Word: kabuki
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the opening tableau of the Gentlemen of Japan, looking like refugees from the Kabuki dancers, the staging is in every way impressive. Aided by a magnificent set by James Peters, Sarah Sweezy's beautiful costumes, and choreography by Elizabeth Theiler, the visual aspect of the play is quite stunning. The movement is fast but controlled, and the stage business is meticulous in detail and execution. Novick is especially successful in out-doing Gilbert's spoof of English attitudes, notably those toward the Orient which did so much to produce the Far-Eastern mess of the 19th Century. The chorus...
...whisked onstage to do a comic turn, punctuated with the oddly archaic slang of the hepcat: "Hey, baby! Let's have a ball!" Occasion : the Manhattan opening of Japan's all-girl Takarazuka Dance Theater, an amalgam of the Folies-Bergere, the Radio City Rockettes, and native Kabuki styles...
About 50 Japanese have been declared to be "living cultural assets." Among them are Kabuki and no actors, potters and painters, and even a couple of old folks who know how to do Kurume-gasuri, a rare, 150-year-old hand-weaving process using white cotton threads and blue dye to produce unique dappled patterns. Tomikichi Moriyama, 70, and his wife Toyono, 67, hand weavers, were delighted with the honor when it came two years ago. After all, only ten other weavers in Japan-most now too old for work-knew Kurume-gasuri] the Moriyamas' son Torao, like most...
...grew up in a jampacked household, the family circle swollen by two servants and seven extra boys, all apprentices from her father's thriving iron factory. No one paid much attention to her, Miyoshi remembers. She was too little. But she managed to steal into the neighborhood Kabuki theater, and had money enough for "ice" candy. Today, onstage, she sings her Flower Drum song...
...curried rice, raw fish or veal cutlet for lunch, go home to green tea, rice, seaweed, lily bulb, lotus root and bean curd. They go to see Marilyn Monroe at the cinema one night, follow this up (finances permitting) with long excursions to lengthy and painstakingly stylized classic Japanese Kabuki or No dramas...