Hello! What are your thoughts on the No.6 musical? Debating getting the blu ray- I’m hoping for more info / reviews before I bite the bullet because it’s expensive lololol
I am soooo thrilled you asked me this question!!!!! I ADORE the No.6 musical with my entire heart lol. I have seen it over a dozen times, not including the weeks of work I spent translating and subtitling it into English. I notice something new each time. It's awesome.
The musical does a very good job of keeping the heart of the original story while cutting it down into a 2 hour 45 minute performance. Many of the lines are verbatim from the novels. When I reread the novels in Japanese last month, I kept encountering lines that I remembered from the musical, and it made me really happy. The musical DEFINITELY feels like speedrunning No.6 (even moreso than the manga!), but it still feels true to the original story and its themes.
You can tell that the cast is invested in the story. Both Safu and Elyurias's actresses mention in the behind the scenes disc that they were No.6 fans! (Unrelated to that, but the women in the cast are the standout singers in my opinion; Karan in particular has a beautifully powerful voice.) Nezumi's actor is excellent at microexpressions and body control. He talked in the behind the scenes disc about how he would practice a particular knife move in moments of weakness in his daily life, such as immediately after waking up in the morning, so that he could pull it off perfectly in the actual performance. There were other moments where you could tell he had really deeply considered Nezumi as a character and how his past and personality might influence his body language. And those are just a few examples of the love that went into the musical.
Asano said that she saw the musical three times! She was really impressed and moved by it. At the talk and signing event that she did on Shion's birthday this month, she told a funny story about how Act I ends on a very tense note, and it was so hard waiting even 15 minutes during the intermission to find out what happened next, and she couldn't imagine what it must have been like waiting a whole year between novel installments when she originally wrote that moment!
ALL OF THAT IS TO SAY. I love the No.6 musical with all my heart, I think it is an excellent adaptation of the story, and I think it has lots of rewatch value. If you are on the fence about purchasing the bluray, I think you should buy it if you can. (Plus the more we support official No.6 stuff, the more likely it is we'll get more new No.6 stuff!)
