トーマス・ベルンハルトの小説『Woodcutters―伐採―（Holzfällen） 』を原作とする日本語字幕付きポーランド語の上演が、ポー ランドの巨匠とも言われるクリスチアン・ルパの翻案・美術・照 明・演出で行われた。フェスティバル・トーキョーの目玉企画であ る。様々な凝った工夫によって、四時間半の長丁場にもかかわらず、 ほとんど苦痛を感じさせずに緊張感を持続させて、非常に良い舞台 であった。ただし本邦初のベルンハルト作品の本格上演であったこ とを考えると、やはり「原作」と「翻案」と「演出」、何よりも「ド イツ語」と「ポーランド語」による印象の相違が、かなり大きかっ たようにも思える。

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Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King, for which she would become the first woman to win a Tony for Best Direction of a Musical, opened at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre in 1997. To recreate this story of savannah animals on the stage, Taymor devised a method that she called “the double event,” in which each character was simultaneously expressed by an actor’s body and an animal mask or puppet. Because the actors’ faces were not hidden from the audience by the masks, their skin colors were closely associated with the characters they portrayed. Skin color is a racial characteristic that is easy to identify visually. As Stephanie Leigh Batiste has pointed out, in her book Darkening Mirrors(2011), the skin color of African-American actors becomes part of their performance, especially in the theater. Recognizing this, Taymor deliberately cast African and Black actors, using “color-conscious casting,” which consciously incorporates actors’ racial characteristics as production elements. By presenting the “color” of African actors to audiences in this way, she embodied an important theme of the musical: “the power of Africa.”

By contrast, the “color” of the white actors was rendered indistinguishable through facial makeup. This paper pays particular attention to the villain Scar, who is typically played by a white actor. Just as in the film on which the musical was based, Scar was the only lion who spoke with a British accent. He was depicted as a “white presence” with a stereotypical Shakespearean actor’s performance style and mannerisms. In his book The Great White Way(2014), Warren Hoffman has argued that the “white people” who appear in most Broadway musicals are positioned as a raceless norm that cannot engender racial problems. By using makeup to paint Scar, the “white presence,” brown, Taymor made it impossible for audiences to interpret Scar as a “white person.”

This paper refers to the three-layered structure assigned to The Lion King’s white actors—actor body, animal mask, and artificial color—as “the triple event.” In doing so, it demonstrates how skillfully obscuring the color of white actors can effectively force “color-blind casting.” By deliberately combining color-conscious casting for Black actors with forced color-blind casting for white actors, Taymor created a phenomenon that can reasonably be considered a form of “reverse racism,” as described by Anne Nicholson Weber in Upstaged: Making Theatre in the Media Age(2006) In disguising the color of white actors, the triple event became a pioneering staging method, serving to overturn the racial privilege of white actors.

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Since the debut of Musical The Prince of Tennis in 2003, stage musicals adapted from two-dimensional media such as manga and anime have gained remarkable popularity in Japan. These “2.5 dimensional musicals” are unique in many ways: they require a comparatively low budget, inexperienced actors, a remarkably simple stage set and demonstrate loyalty to the original material. In these ways, they are distinct from the more conventional and imported musical productions performed at major Japanese commercial theaters. Among the unique characteristics of 2.5 dimensional musicals, one of the most distinct is its principle of the adaptation. To adapt the original material from page to stage, musicals can either remain faithful to or deviate from the original material. In conventional musicals, faithfulness to the original material is not their main purpose. Writers cut, change and adapt the original material to serve their purpose and create “original” shows. Conversely, in 2.5 dimensional musicals, faithfulness to the original material is of great importance. The name of the genre itself suggests the importance and uniqueness of the ideals of the adaptation; 2.5 dimensional musicals strive to remain faithful to the original manga/anime image and create an effect that allows the audience to perceive what they see as two-dimensional even though the performance itself is undeniably happening in three-dimensional theater space. The latter characteristic prompted the emergence of the name “2.5 dimensional” musicals. Although its two-dimensionality has attracted notice, the fact that the performances have also been set to music and dance has been overlooked - in some cases, both musical and non-musical shows have been classified as “2.5 dimensional musicals.” To analyze the characteristics of the 2.5 dimensional musical, this study will compare Musical The Prince of Tennis with mainstream musicals such as Beauty and the Beast (1994) More than ten productions have been made of Musical The Prince of Tennis series; this paper focuses on the opening numbers of those productions. In conventional musicals, opening numbers are expected to function as an important part of the show. Opening numbers set the context, introduce characters, direct the story, present the theme, and essentially, open the show. This study aims to reveal the characteristics of Musical The Prince of Tennis and investigate how musical numbers work in those shows through comparison of the elements that characterize opening numbers.

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This paper investigates the perceived images of female characters by analysing reviews of Otojiro Kawakami’s Terumaro: the Japanese version of Hamlet in 1903 and his strategies of using both male and female performers. After his second trip to Europe, Otojiro staged Shakespeare’s plays with his wife, Sadayakko. Hamlet was Otojiro’s third of four Shakespeare productions, and was an adaptation set in Japanese society in the Meiji era, so the female characters reflect Japanese women of that period. Both the social image of Japanese women and the physical features of performers influenced how characters were depicted. Furthermore, Otojiro encouraged his performers to act ‘naturally’, so reviewers could not ignore the presence of female bodies in the performance. This paper classifies performers into three types; actresses (joyu); who follow European acting styles, Onnagata; male performers playing female roles in traditional Kabuki styles, and Onnayakusha; female performers performing both sexes’ roles in the Kabuki style and who traditionally formed all female troupes. In this adaptation, the image of virginity presented in Orie, (Ophelia) was strengthened by cutting her obscene lines and songs. In spite of this revision, some reviewers did not accept Orie as intended because of the choice of performer, since Sadayakko had been a geisha. Others described her performance as, “natural”. This choice of word shows the reviewers’ awareness that female characters were more convincing as actual women when performed by females. Thanks to her past experience Sadayakko had both Japanese and European physicality, and this ambiguity provoked such contrasting evaluations. By contrast, Yaeko (Gertrude) performed by Shinobu Ishida, an Onnagata, was severely criticized by reviewers including Kayo Yamagishi, one of the adapters of Otojiro’s Hamlet. Otojiro pursued realistic acting styles but Ishida, being biologically male, could not meet this expectation. Otojiro grasped not only the importance but also the risks involved in having actual females on stage. It was uncommon for both sexes to perform together at that time, so female performers exposed themselves to the risk of sexual objectification. To avoid this, Otojiro attempted to make his troupe look austere and to portray he and his wife as an ideal couple in patriarchal Japan. To bolster this image, he also chose plays including women embodying traditional feminine virtue, and was at pains to portray these images to the media. This study demonstrates the importance of Otojiro’s endeavors in naturalistic performance and of the appearance of female performers identified with fictional characters. Moreover, this adaptation of Hamlet paradoxically shows an awareness of women’s spontaneous sexuality by concealing the sexual objectification of female bodies.

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