Elisabeth das Musical: The Japanese Productions, Takarazuka and Toho
Plot Summary: The musical opens with Luigi Lucheni, our narrator, being judged in the underworld for killing Elisabeth, the empress of Austria. He says that Death wanted him to do it, and that she wanted to die because she was in love with Death. The musical goes back in time and Lucheni narrates Elisabeth’s life and we see her from age 16 to 60. Her obsession with death grows as her mental health declines, as Death falls in love with her and tries to convince her to kill herself so they can be together. The musical deals with mental health issues and also has multiple main LGBT+ characters.
For anyone not familiar with the musical, above is the summary of the plot. The summary of the life of the musical is it premiered in 1992 in Austria in the German language. There have been two Austrian revivals since in 2003 and 2012, and constant new productions in Germany, Hungary, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, Czechia, Switzerland and South Korea.
I would highly recommend watching the original 1992 Vienna production and the 2006 Vienna revival, both are on Youtube with English subtitles.
In Japan there are two different theatre troupes who have been performing productions of Elisabeth for over 20 years. Takarazuka is a theatre troupe of only female performers who play both the female and male roles. They don’t change the male characters into women, they essentially crossdress and perform as men, just as the female character of Edna Turnblad in the musical Hairspray is always played by a man. They had their first production of Elisabeth in 1996 and a few new songs were added for that production. There are the main casts but also every production has one night where junior stars of the troupe perform in the lead roles. These are called shinjin kouen or ‘Shinko’ casts. Toho is a mixed-gender theatre troupe who first performed the musical in 2000. It’s common in Japan for musicals to have pro-shots and DVDs so all the links to videos below are the official videos, not bootlegs. There are no official English subtitles provided for Takarazuka or Toho’s DVD releases, but some fans make their own subtitles that you can download and to play you’ll need video playing program like VLC in that can separately load up videos and subtitle files to play at the same time. You can also look on CastAlbums which is a great website that documents all musical albums and videos you can see lists of every CD and DVD release for Elisabeth here.
Please support the musicals! You can purchase the DVDs and CDs new from https://www.soundofmusic-shop.de/ and you can find them new and second-hand on Ebay and Yahoo Auctions Japan (there’s a lot of other Takarazuka and Toho merch on Yahoo Auctions, but you will need to use a proxy shipping server. I personally use ZenMarket).
Under the read more is links to info on each production as well as links to where you can watch them and download audios and English subtitles.
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