Feb 1

Justin’s Japan: ‘Tokio Confidential,’ ‘Our Planet’ Premiere Next Week

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Mel Maghuyop and Manna Nichols in rehearsals for ‘Tokio Confidential,’ playing Feb. 5-19 at the Atlantic Theater Stage 2. (Philip Smith)

By JQ magazine editor Justin Tedaldi (CIR Kobe-shi, 2001-02) for Examiner.com. Visit his Japanese culture page here for related stories.

Words, music and the history of the world collide next week with the new theatrical presentation of Tokio Confidential at Atlantic Theater Stage 2 from Feb. 5-19 and Our Planet at Japan Society for one night only on Feb. 6.

A new musical penned entirely by Eric Schorr and helmed by Joanna McKeon (the associate director of the Broadway and national tour editions of Green Day’s American Idiot), Tokio Confidential (a Richard Rogers Award finalist) is set in 1879 the hidden pleasure quarters of Meiji era Japan.

Isabella Archer, a young American war widow, crosses an ocean in search of a lost love—and is about to cross a line from which she can never return. When Isabella falls in love with a renowned Japanese tattoo artist, she enters a world of extreme beauty, becoming an object of unexpected desire—in a realm of unspeakable danger. It’s a journey across the boundaries between pleasure and pain, art and artifice, the secrets of the flesh and the sins of the heart.