New Show in Manhattan

Grand Kabuki made its U.S. debut at Manhattan's City Center at the very moment that all Broadway went dark (see SHOW BUSINESS), and comments about its shedding compensating light were inevitable. For this is one of Japan's oldest and greatest theater troupes, to whose dance-and-song-dotted productions Japanese audiences go again and again--as they do in the West to nightclub turns or ballets--to savor particular details, or compare performances, or await dramatic or choreographic high points. Unlike previous Kabuki-type visitors to America, Grand Kabuki, as true Kabuki, consists of all-male casts. Though Kabuki actually originated around 1600 with a woman dancer, one of its great modern claims to distinction is its onnagata, or extraordinary female impersonators.

For its three weeks at City Center, Grand Kabuki went American Plan in three ways: it offered audiences individual transistor radios to hear about what was happening on the stage, it permitted curtain calls, and it cut its usual five-hour performances to three. On its opening bill were an adaptation of a classic 15th-century No drama, a doll or puppet play, and a work of late 19th-century "realism." Whatever their genre, all three are some times elaborately, sometimes delicately stylized, even to their high-pitched speech; far from merely accepting stage artifices, they glory in them and glorify them. The result is often a triumph of manner. The actor does not lose himself in the part; he arrays himself in it. Sometimes the action approaches the formal repose of sculpture, at other times the formal movement of ballet. Perhaps the Kabuki method itself tends toward theatrical rather than dramatic rewards.

Of the three plays, much the richest and finest is the old No play, where distance in time mates well with that of place; where everything is the more ritualized for being more barbaric; where there is a splendid show of costume and music (the chief instrument is the banjo-like samisen), of processions and dancing. Here, too, the story is the universal one of the resourceful servant, who in this case plays a serious role: he gets his disguised young master past a hostile mountain barrier. Among many felicities, the acting and formal dancing of Shoroku II,* as the retainer, stand out.

The doll play, telling of a blind man and his wife who commit suicide, and of a goddess who restores them to life, scores chiefly through details and through Utaemon VI's acting as the woman. To a Westerner, the snail-paced story seems more often theatrically trite than poetically touching. On the other hand, the final play--telling of a rich provincial who falls in love with a courtesan and tries, with tragic consequences, to buy her out of her brothel--has not only pictorial charm but genuine story and character interest. Here Grand Kabuki conveys very well the theatrical vividness--and the esthetic purity--of its method, without any hint of vulgarity. And though the Kabuki method, by making a ceremony of the mere uttering of platitudes or repeating of pleasantries, often sadly slows things down, even that has its uses in a Broadway world always hell-bent on speeding things up.

* The numeral denotes the number of Kabuki actors who have had the same name.

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