I saw something a few weeks ago which amazed me to such an extent that even after 2 weeks I'm still not sure I can convey the complexity of the event.
My co-worker and longtime friend Nyan-nyan-chan took a few (well-deserved) days off of work. I assumed that he was just going to be holing up at home with some pornos, as is his habit, but in fact he was working on a show from Japan. He kept referring to it as 大衆演劇 "popular theater" of the worst kind, and coming from him, who most of the time LOVES the razzle-dazzle simple pleasures of spectacle in entertainment for the masses, that was saying a lot.
Let me backtrack a little bit and say that in my academic studies of theater, in the early to mid-1990s, we meticulously followed the course of popular theater across culture and throughout human history. Theater has historically been a dirty low-class business, hardly a step away from prostitution. Certain rulers, patrons and artists were able to elevate theater and promote it as an intellectual and artistic endeavor, but its populist roots were deep. And so it was in Japan. The first appearance of the seeds of traditional theater were in sarugaku, a form of song and dance. Originally women performed by the riverbanks in the outskirts of town -- but because this entertainment was so deeply tied to prostitution, women were banned from performing. Out of sarugaku arose what has come to be known as noh theater (the solemn, serious, mystical heavy slow drama, performed with droning chants and jolting percussion-heavy music, and masks) and kyogen, noh's comic cousin, much akin in form and content to commedia dell'arte. Now, after several hundred years of codification of the physical training and staging, both noh and kyogen are treated with great reverence as an irreplaceable relic and living cultural treasure. But when you think about it, hundreds of years ago, the Lords of feudal society were paying for noh and kyogen actors to entertain them.
So if noh & kyogen (and kabuki) as we know them today have tracked the trajectory of the "high" art in terms of fidelity of principal and construction, custom and systemic rituals of the form, then where has the spirit of popular theater gone?
Well not to fret, it is alive today, tottering on shaky legs, in Sawa Ryuji, The Return. Sawa Ryuji is an old school populist actor. He and his "school" of theater is precisely that of popular theater. It is about entertaining the masses, it's about spectacle and drama (laugh and cry, and catharsis). So for its value as a cultural phenomenon alone his show was worth seeing.
As for the show itself... There is no way for me to aptly describe what it was, but let me try. Imagine a showcase/revue, a sequence of vignettes, scenes, dances and songs, featuring a variety of performers playing a variety of different roles. The main actor is a middle-aged (50s?) man who's like a cross between Tammy Fae Baker and Bruce Willis. He performs ridiculously choreographed stylized sword fights in which he defeats legions of enemy without ever getting within 3 feet of them. Every time he makes an entrance, an MC on mic announces his name over the blown-out PA system, and the audience is supposed to shout his name and cheer him on. He appears in vignette after vignette, with minimal dialogue and maximum maudlin melodrama and cheap spectacle, and there is a perpetual spotlight on him, no matter where he is on stage. In the finale, he comes out in an emerald green sequined Japanese gown, and sings a song about how there's only the actor's life for him. He is sweaty, wobbling into the house (full of Americans who haven't understood a word he has said throughout the evening, and probably think this is "great exotic Japanese performance"), and full of pride. At the curtain call, he attempts to introduce some of the long-time actors in his company, but he can't remember their names. Ah, the irony, the poignancy, the heartbreak...
