
Contents
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The Takarazuka Music School The Takarazuka Music School
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The 1920s and 1930s The 1920s and 1930s
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Takarazuka post-Kobayashi Takarazuka post-Kobayashi
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Sayonara Sayonara
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Repertoire Repertoire
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Fan Culture Fan Culture
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Takarazuka in Perfomance: The Dream Machine Takarazuka in Perfomance: The Dream Machine
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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19 The Dream Machine: Takarazuka, Japan’s All-Female Musical Theatre Extravaganza
Get accessBud Coleman is the Roe Green Professor of Theatre and the Associate Dean of Faculty Success in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. A former dancer with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Fort Worth Ballet, and Ballet Austin, Coleman has directed and choreographed many musicals. In 2008 he directed and choreographed the musical Company in Vladivostok, Russia (with the assistance of a US State Department grant), was selected to be a 2009–2010 Fulbright lecturer in Japan, and in the spring of 2017 directed the Thai premiere of Fiddler on the Roof. Recent publications include essays in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, The Great North American Stage Directors, and iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age. With Judith Sebesta he co-edited Women in American Musical Theatre: Essays on Lyricists, Writers, Arrangers, Choreographers, Designers, Producers, and Performance Artists. He is also the co-author (with Pamyla Stiehl) of Backstage Pass: A Survey of American Musical Theater.
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Published:23 October 2023
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Abstract
After a modest start in 1914 with a troupe of seventeen young Japanese women, the Takarazuka empire has grown into a large entertainment company which performs to 2.5 million fans every year. Now employing over four hundred women (divided into five troupes), the company owns two 2,000-seat theatres, and at least one troupe is touring at any given time. The Takarazuka aesthetic is a Technicolor pastiche of many performing arts genres: Broadway musical, Las Vegas revue, Busby Berkeley extravaganza and show choir. The most famous performers in the troupe are the women who perform the male characters; their performance of masculinity is not conventional drag, where the intent is to pass; nor is it a camp performance, where the performer and audience share a knowing wink at the artifice. The otokoyaku simultaneously presents both traditional male and female visual codes. While they may thicken their eyebrows and add facial hair, they also don fake eyelashes and apply eyeshadow; the goal is not verisimilitude. With eighty to a hundred elaborately costumed performers on stage, the goal of the company is clear: to create dreams.
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