Word: kabuki
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Japan's Kabuki or People's Theater is nowhere near as stuffy as the ancient and stylized No drama, but in 300 years, even the Kabuki has become a bit hidebound. Back in 1931, Japan's top Kabuki player, jut-jawed Actor Chojuro Kawarasaki, decided to liberate...
Like many a Broadway and Hollywood contemporary, Actor Kawarasaki had a tickling Marxian social conscience. He organized a new Kabuki troupe called the Zenshinza (Forward-Looking Theater), set up shop in a sleek, modern playhouse outside Tokyo, defied tradition by hiring women actors to play female parts and began mixing Western dramas with the Japanese classics. When V-J brought democracy officially to Japan, Democrat Kawarasaki was ready with a full-fledged production of John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln (TIME...
Discriminating geisha girls came near to swooning over him. Austere drama critics agreed that no Kabuki actor had mastered his art more perfectly. A great lover, onstage and off, lithe, handsome, 64-year-old Nizaemon Kataoka was Japan's Van Johnson, Alfred Lunt and John Barrymore rolled into...
...complex hierarchy of Japanese drama, the Kabuki (literally "type of theater"), originated by Folk Dancer O Kuni in 1603, comes closest to the western theater. Less formal than the classical Noh drama, its stages extend into the audience like burlesque runways. Actresses are rare in Kabuki, and Nizaemon was equally at home in both male and female parts. As the leading lady in Akoya he had to perform expertly on three difficult musical instruments. His interpretation of the murdered warrior in The Story of the Soga was second to none...
...Tokyo conditions have long been dismal. All movies and theaters (except the ancient Kabuki plays) are closed. Rationing is strict, and there is little for sale. Night workers, miners and Navy personnel are permitted to buy vitamins. A bottle of about 300 pills is sold to authorized people for about 40?. Health conditions are wretched. All diseases of malnutrition (like beriberi) are rampant. The tuberculosis rate has risen steeply. Malaria is a scourge, probably because of water-filled bomb craters in which mosquitoes breed and because of infected veterans returning from the South Pacific. Typhoid is widespread, probably because...