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Dear Boys Basketball Manga Gets Stage Play in April

The official website for Kodansha's Mixalive TOKYO entertainment venue announced on Monday that Hiroki Yagami's Dear Boys manga will get a stage play adaptation in April. The play will run for one month at Nelke Planning's "Theater Mixa" in Mixalive TOKYO in Ikebukuro.

The stage play will star Reo Nagatsuma (Here is Greenwood stage play) of 7ORDER Project as Kazuhiko Aikawa. Imagine Itо̄ will direct the play. The Umebо̄ dance group will handle choreography.

Yagami's original Dear Boys manga focuses on Kazuhiko Aikawa, a transfer student to Mizuho High School. A lack of players and a coach quitting due to conflict with a student leaving the team have left the Mizuho High School basketball team gutted. Aikawa joins, and brings the team back to competitive shape through his love of the game. Eventually, the manga shares its focus between the Mizuho High School team and the teams and players of other schools.

Yagami launched the first Dear Boys manga in 1989 and ended it in 1997. The series has 40 million copies in print. The Dear Boys: The Early Days prequel manga followed from February to May 1997. Yagami launched the sequel manga Dear Boys Act II in 1997 and ended it in 2008. The sequel won the Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen manga in 2007. Yagami launched Dear Boys Act 3 in December 2008 and ended it in December 2015. Yagami then launched the Dear Boys Overtime sequel manga in Monthly Shonen Magazine in February 2016 and ended it in January 2017. Kodansha shipped the third and final compiled volume in February 2017.

Yagami launched the Dear Boys Act 4 manga in Monthly Shonen Magazine in October 2018. The story is set one year after Kazuhiko and Mizuho High School's inter-high victory, and is set in the famous Shōnan Dai Sagami High School, Mizuho's rival school. The manga centers on Fuse, the school basketball team's ace who aims for the nationals, and a new freshman protagonist. Dear Boys Shōnan Dai Sagami Special Selection, a spinoff manga Dear Boys Act 4 manga launched in February 2019. The story is set two years before the story of Dear Boys Act 4, when Ayumi Fuse was still a first-year high school student.

The first manga inspired a 26-episode television anime series that premiered in Japan in 2003. Bandai Entertainment released the anime (retitled as Hoop Days) in English in 2005.

Kodansha will open Mixalive TOKYO, a new nine-floor entertainment venue building, in Ikebukuro on March 19. The building will feature "live" content for manga, novels, children's books, practical books, gravure works, and fashion. Kodansha is partnering with King Records, TV Tokyo, Nelke Planning, Bushiroad, MOVIC, and UUUM on the building.

Sources: Mixalive TOKYO's website, Comic Natalie