Kabuki Woogie began in 2011 as a way to record a research trip to Japan I took on a Mellon Fellowship a year earlier. My day-to day-experiences on that trip, including videos and photos, are archived at the beginning of the blog. Over the past few years, Kabuki Woogie provided regular entries on the history of the first Kabuki-za, Japan’s leading kabuki playhouse, founded in 1889, and still on the same site after four additional incarnations. The series, which offered 24 chapters, ended recently with a chapter on 1911, when the theatre underwent significant renovation, ending its first incarnation.
In November 2018, I began to post images of the cover of each month’s issue of the long-running kabuki magazine, Engekikai (Theatre World), which I’ve provided on Facebook for a number of years. I will also post any other items of kabuki interest as they become available, including my own writings. All previous entries remain intact and can be found by using the search box.
This is the cover of Engekikai
for December (#12) 2018, showing Nakamura Kankuro as Satō Shirobei Tadanobu,
in reality the fox Genkurō, in the “Yoshinoyama” (Yoshino Mountains) scene of Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura (Yoshitsune and
the Thousand Cherry Trees). The production was at the Kabuki-za in October. The
issue’s contents headlined on the cover include a major section on Kyoto’s rebuilt
Minami-za, that city’s famous kabuki theatre, with contributions from the great
actors Sakata Tōjūrō
and Kataoka Nizaemon, both of them exemplars of the acting style associated
with Kyoto-Osaka kabuki. There are also interviews with Matsumoto Hakuō
(father), Matsumoto Kōshirō (son), and Ichikawa Somegorō (grandson) regarding their
recent ascension to these names. Other interviews are with actors Kataoka
Hidetarō and Onoe Ukon, there’s a discussion between actors Nakamura Ganjirō
and his son, Nakamura Senjaku, as well as a piece covering the visit of Shōchiku
Grand Kabuki to Paris for the Japonism 2018 festival there.
