-
Visiting Maine
I think it’s too late to write this entry, but I visited Portland and Boothbay Harbor, Maine in this September. I watched a musical play Carousel at Kokugakuin Tochigi High School performed by its musical club a few weeks before. Carousel is a musical that features a love story of a young girl and a barker in Maine, filmed in 1956. That inspired me to visit this state and, if I could, eat some lobsters and clambakes. There were no direct flights from Tokyo to Maine, so I chose flights from Tokyo (Narita) to New York (JFK), and from LaGuardia to Portland (Maine’s largest city). All flights were Delta Airlines.
-
Half a Sixpence again
I visited Kokugakuin Tochigi High School where a friend of mine taught dancing and choreography to the student of the Musical Club as an instructor. There was a cultural festival of this school, and the Musical Club members performed Half A Sixpence. It was the second time to see this show since I saw it ten years before at just the same place.That motivated me to visit Folkestone, England where it took place.
-
Deep in England
Last weekend was happy days for me because I deeply experienced a British taste last Saturday and Sunday. From the beginning, I preferred the USA to the UK or other English-speaking countries. Still, my affection has been shifting to England for years since I happened to read Kaoru Mori’s Emma, a romance manga about a maid in England in the Victorian Era who falls in love with a member of the gentry. On the first day, the first thing I did is to see Oliver! by the Musical Club of Kokugakuin Tochigi High School playing for the school’s cultural festival held this weekend. Oliver! is, as you may already know, […]
-
Oklahoma!
This year I saw Oklahoma! at Kokugakuin Tochigi University High School. Every year I go to the cultural festival of this high school to see a play performed by the Musical Club. This club consists of tenth and twelfth graders of this high school, playing musical on an after-school basis. They have regular performances several times a year, and the biggest one is a show at the cultural festival in early September. Mieko Saigusa, one of this club’s instructors in charge of choreography, is the lady I know well and look forward to seeing once a year. That’s why I go to this high school even though I didn’t graduate […]
-
SHOW BOAT
Today I went to Kokugakuin Tochigi University High School to see the musical SHOW BOAT that the students of the Musical Club of this high school performed. Every year I go to Tochigi to watch Musical Club’s performance because they play very well like professional actors, although they are just high school students, and you can see such wonderful shows for free. I used to drive to Tochigi by car but this year I have no longer my own car so I got there by trains (Subway and Tobu Isesaki and Nikko lines). I arrived at Tochigi station at 8:30 am. It took about ten minutes from Tochigi station to […]
-
Oliver!
I went to Tochigi last Sunday to watch a musical show performed by Kokugakuin Tochigi High School’s Musical Club in this high school’s cultural festival held that weekend. I watch this club’s musical every year for these several years. One of my keypals, Mito Saigusa, works for Kokugakuin Tochigi High School as a dance instructor for the Musical Club, so I’m very interested in what the students she is teaching play. This year’s show was Oliver!, a well-known British musical by Lionel Bart. It’s a story of a little orphan whose name is Oliver Twist. Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.