Halloween and Kabuki Make a Great Combination

The strikingly modern Kanagawa Geijutu Gekijo Hall was the venue for "Special Autumn Kabuki, SHIN 2011". While Fearless and Matsuzaki-san availed themselves of the facilities semi-hidden beneath the main staircase, I perched on a cushioned bench in the vast lobby and pretended to watch a program on the big-screen television while taking mental snapshots of my surroundings to share with my theater relatives and friends.  (College Boy is taking an acting class this term so my pantheon of theater relatives has expanded by fifty percent.)

Ticket-holders ride a series of escalators up to the theater's main entrance on the fifth floor. The space beneath the escalators houses a busy radio station overlooking the lobby.

A restaurant with windows stretching to the top of the second floor sits on the opposite side of the lobby beneath what I am pretty sure is a second, smaller theater.

We hustled up to the fifth floor and plastered contrite expressions on our mugs as our host informed an usher that two of our three admission tickets were affixed to a refrigerator in Yokosuka.  We were instructed to stand aside; the officials would verify that our seats were empty a few minutes before the program began and then rush us through a labyrinth of elevators, escalators, staircases, and corridors to the second mezzanine.

While we cooled our heels in a corner, I admired the usherettes in their snappy blue suits with yellow and orange scarves tied in perky bows around their necks.  This would be an easy costume to pull off for the Shonan Halloween party next week, the absolute final ultimate last time I will ever, ever, ever attend a costume party (not counting the cowboy wedding this December, of course).

We had another five minutes to kill once the costume issue was settled.  Matsuzaki-san stood over one of the circular air-conditioning ducts dotting the floor and struck a Marilyn Monroe pose that cracked us up.  Fearless, who had already suffered a click of my tongue when she reached over a balcony to stroke a copper-colored wall, proved to be as immune as my children to my chastisements when a "Do Not Enter" sign caught her eye.

She did not leap over that barrier, much to my relief, but she did remove the circular disk from the stand to show us the sign is a magnet. What a good idea!

After we were finally permitted to enter the theater and take our seats, I pulled out my camera and managed to snap one photograph before the nearest usherette dashed to our aisle and let me know with a flick of an index finger that photography is not permitted inside the theater. My apologies to my theater relatives and friends. I should have aimed my camera at the stage when lining up that first shot.

Before the usherette had a chance to scamper back to our aisle and exercise the universal signal for Shut Your Mouth, Matsuzaki-san explained that Shin Kabuki is a fairly new concept involving a collaboration between taiko drummers, shamisen strummers, and kabuki actors. After a series of individual performances, the eight main performers fielded questions from the audience in a talk show format and then the lights dimmed again for the grand finale, wherein the Brothers Nakamura danced while accompanied by the twangy strings and pounding drums.

Ix-nay on that usherette costume idea.  I'm going to be a taiko drummer for Halloween this year. Those athletic drummers never fail to capture the rhythm of my heart.