For his first foray into the realm of opera, dramatist Toshiki Okada is tackling Ikuma Dan’s one-act “Yuzuru” (“Twilight Crane”), a Japanese classic that has been performed here almost 1,000 times since its premiere in 1952.
It is certainly not the first time that the 48-year-old Okada, who is the founder of Tokyo’s globe-trotting Chelfitsch theater company and winner of many of Japan's top drama awards, has sought to expand his creative horizons. From 2016 to 2019, he held the position of director of repertoires at the Munich Kammerspiele in Germany, and in June he presented his self-penned contemporary noh play, “Unfulfilled Ghost and the Monster: Zaha/Tsuruga,” which questions both Japan’s nuclear power policy and the discord among Olympic organizers that resulted in one scandal after another in the lead-up to this year’s Games.
The opera “Yuzuru” is based on a 1949 play of the same name by leading postwar playwright Junji Kinoshita, which draws upon a folk story about a poor farmer named Yohyo (Takumi Yogi) who saves an injured crane that later transforms into a beautiful woman named Tsu (Sara Kobayashi) and marries him.
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