By JQ magazine editor Justin Tedaldi (CIR Kobe-shi, 2001-02). Justin has written about Japanese arts and entertainment for JETAA since 2005. For more of his articles, click here.
Stay warm this winter with some hot local events, from live showcases that will transport you to another time and place, a clutch of new anime screenings, and a live J-idol performance you won’t want to miss.
This month’s highlights include:
Feb. 5, 6, 9
Various theaters
Various prices
Anime Expo Cinema Nights presents Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Caught up in a world of dreams, lost in the cruelty of reality. What should have been an easy bounty turns into biological war after a terrorist gets hold of a deadly virus. Drawn in by the pretty price on the mastermind’s head, Spike and the Bebop crew are ready to collect a much-needed reward. Unfortunately, the gang’s about to find themselves in more trouble than money when the terrorist threatens to unleash the virus on Halloween– effectively killing everyone on Mars. With little time and leads that seem more dreamy than helpful, they’ll have to use their own bag of tricks to stop a dangerous plot.
Feb 5-7, March 29
We Call It Ballet: Sleeping Beauty in a Dazzling Light Show
Gerald W. Lynch Theater, 524 West 59th Street
$45-$65
Experience Sleeping Beauty like never before in this dance and light show. Enjoy a unique fusion of classical ballet and modern technology, where local dancers literally light up the stage with glittering routines and glow-in-the-dark costumes. The timeless tale of the cursed princess awakened by her true love’s kiss comes to life on stage, as pirouettes and gravity-defying leaps cast a kaleidoscope of colours across the space. It’s a beautiful production you won’t want to miss!
Thursday, Feb. 6, 7:30 p.m.
Barclays Center, 620 Atlantic Avenue (Brooklyn)
From $274
Last call! Due to overwhelming demand for the sold-out Hans Zimmer Live 2024 North American fall tour, the award-winning film composer has added an additional show in Brooklyn. This performance is the last opportunity for NYC-area fans to see Hans Zimmer Live before he begins working on a brand-new live production. Hans Zimmer Live showcases the multiple Academy Award® and Grammy winning composer’s groundbreaking audio and visual show featuring a selection of the composer’s scores, brought to life by Zimmer and his 18-piece live band and full orchestra. The newly arranged concert suites include music from Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight, Interstellar, The Lion King, The Last Samurai and Dune, for which Zimmer received his second Academy Award®.
Feb. 7-14
Obayashi ’80s: The Onomichi Trilogy & Kadokawa Years
Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street
$16, $12 members
These six teenage symphonies of Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) are wound in a melancholy nostalgia for a period indelibly lost to time—that inexpressible gap between adolescence and adulthood. Braiding visually expressive fantasias with striking formal experimentation and pop-art boldness, Obayashi’s idiosyncratic cinematic language produced some of Japan’s most beloved seishun eiga in the 1980s. Captivating generations of filmgoers with his earnest portraits of young love and vanished worldviews, Obayashi’s films were further bolstered by Kadokawa’s innovative tactics of popularizing dreamy pop idols like Hiroko Yakushimaru and Tomoyo Harada. With a career overshadowed abroad by the oddball eccentricity of his electric 1977 debut House, the 1980s would prove to be the high-water mark of Obayashi’s popularity, epitomized by his endearing Onomichi trilogy—set in the filmmaker’s hometown of Onomichi, the site of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Framed in 35mm viewfinders, against wildly ingenious chroma-key composites and characterized by his unflagging optimism for the youth of Japan, Obayashi’s youth passages are caught up in the ages of transition, demonstrably attuned to the extraordinary nature of ordinary adolescence. Curated by Alexander Fee.
Saturday, Feb. 8, 7:00 p.m.
PHANTOM SIITA “Moth to a flame Tour” – 1st World Tour
Palladium Times Square, 1515 Broadway
From $86.60
The retro horror-inspired J-pop group PHANTOM SIITA — composed of Mona, Miu, Rinka, Hisui, and Moka — has announced their first ever world tour, dubbed “Moth to a flame,” which will include 15 stops across Asia, North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. The five-member idol unit made the announcement at their major solo concert “Haine,” held at the prestigious Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. “Our first world tour ‘Moth to a flame’ has been announced. While this is a venture into the unknown for us, we hope to reach everyone around the world who always supports us,” says the girl group in a press statement. “We’re excited to showcase our ‘retro horror’ style to you all.”
Feb. 17-18
City Winery, 25 Eleventh Avenue
$75-$325
With his signature beard and African headgear, Billy F Gibbons is instantly recognizable. He’s best known as the centerpiece and one third of ZZ Top, the band that came together in 1969 and has stayed part of the American musical landscape ever since – the longest running major rock band still composed of its original members. Billy and bandmates Dusty Hill and Frank Beard were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, most appropriately by Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, a longtime friend of Billy’s. A musician’s musician, Billy F Gibbons is a wellspring of what he likes to refer to as the “three T’s”: tone, taste and tenacity. His transcendent creativity in a broad variety of artistic and intellectual endeavors with his three solo albums to date has stood him in good stead over the years underscoring his undisputed status as music’s most highly regarded Renaissance man. Joining Gibbons for these intimate performances are Chris “Whipper” Layton and Mike ‘The Drifter’ Flanigin of the BFGs.
Wednesday, Feb. 19, 8:00 p.m.
Yuja Wang, Piano & Víkingur Ólafsson, Piano
Carnegie Hall, 881 Seventh Avenue
$118-$295
Two of today’s most exciting pianists join forces for a wide-ranging program of works for two pianos and piano four hands. Individually, Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson constantly surpass even the loftiest expectations, earning worldwide renown while exploring some of the piano repertoire’s most formidable works. With this new collaboration, they unlock a world of programmatic possibilities. Experience Rachmaninoff’s own two-piano arrangement of his Symphonic Dances; the breathtaking Fantasie by Schubert; Thomas Adès’s arrangement of one of Nancarrow’s “impossible” studies for player piano; and exhilarating works by innovators such as Cage, Berio, John Adams, and Arvo Pärt.
Feb. 20-March 23
The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street
$65-$93
Entrenched in an elite sumo training facility in Tokyo, six men practice, eat, love, play, and ultimately fight. Step into the sacred world of sumo wrestling, with the New York premiere of Lisa Sanaye Dring’s mesmerizing new drama, SUMO. Akio arrives as an angry, ambitious 18-year-old with a lot to learn. Expecting validation, dominance, and fame, and desperate to move up the ranks, he slams headlong into his fellow wrestlers. With sponsorship money at stake, their bodies on the line, and their futures at risk, the wrestlers struggle to carve themselves—and one another—into the men they dream of being. SUMO is a thrilling new play set in an elite and rarely explored world. Obie Award winner Ralph B. Peña directs this powerhouse drama. SUMO features live taiko drumming by Shih-Wei Wu.
Opens Friday, Feb. 28
Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning-
Various theaters
Various prices
Amate Yuzuriha is a high-school student living peacefully in a space colony floating in outer space. When she meets a war refugee named Nyaan, Amate is drawn into the illegal mobile suit dueling sport known as Clan Battle. Under the entry name “Machu,” she throws herself into fierce battle day after day, piloting the GQuuuuuuX. Then an unidentified Gundam mobile suit pursued by both the space force and the police appears before her, along with its pilot, a boy named Shuji. Now their world is about to enter a new era.
The first-ever major collaboration between studio khara, the studio behind the Evangelion series, and Sunrise, the historic home to the Mobile Suit Gundam animated works, brings together an all-star creative team for a groundbreaking new entry to the Gundam universe. Directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki (FLCL), with a screenplay co-written by legendary screenwriter Yoji Enokido (Revolutionary Girl Utena) and acclaimed filmmaker Hideaki Anno (Evangelion series), Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning- is a stunning visual feast that will captivate fans, both old and new.
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