Word: takarazuka
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...came pumping out of the pit like an echo from a Ziegfeld revue. A couple 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...
Founded four decades ago as a "musical bridge between East and West," Takarazuka (named after its home town in Japan) presents thinly disguised Broadway and Paris turns, together with jazzed-up versions of Japanese fairy and folk tales, all held together in a sukiyaki-like mixture of muted native music and brassy show tunes. The 400 girls of the Takarazuka company (their motto: "Be pure, be right, be beautiful") sing everything from high soprano to near baritone, and the male impersonators among them pass out pinup photos by the thousands to their frenzied teen-age following...
Occasionally, as in the military exercise known as Bo Odori, in which sticks, sickles and wooden swords were flourished in ritualistic confusion, the dance had an authentic feel. But more often, Takarazuka's "musical bridge" seemed a one-way street that fell 20 years short of its goal. After watching an animal turn called Shan Shan Uma, in which two dancers represented the front and hindquarters of a horse, the New York Daily News's John Chapman commented: "I kept muttering to myself 'Shan Shan Uma on the Rillera.' This helped some...
...free-for-all trademark squabble (see BUSINESS' The Wild Frontier) ONE sunny day last week a helicopter landed on the heliport atop the Sankei Kaikan, the daily newspaper Sangyo Keizai's building. Out stepped Edgar R. Baker, managing director of TIME'S international editions. Quickly, pretty Takarazuka girls presented him with a bouquet as thanks for TIME'S story about Takarazuka (in Music, Jan. 3), the city whose principal industry is innocent merriment...
Today, 82 and frail. Kobayashi rarely leaves his villa near Takarazuka. except for a monthly visit to his theater. Next day he sends cryptic memos to the directors. He still manages to keep his musical empire humming, brings eminent Western concert stars to the town (e.g., Singers Marian Anderson and Helen Traubel, Violinist Yehudi Menuhin). Early this year, he will repossess Takarazuka's Tokyo branch, which the occupation forces had turned into the famed Ernie Pyle movie theater. Last week the old showman ventured forth to take in a special show with a Christmas finale. Sample lyric...