News

Glass Mask Stage Show, Shōnen Onmyōji Musical Planned

Yukio Ninagawa, the famed Japanese director of several Shakespeare plays and the Kiki's Delivery Service musical, is holding auditions for 16- to 25-year-old actresses for next August's stage adaptation of Glass no Kamen (The Glass Mask) shōjo manga in Saitama, Japan. The audition will fill the lead starlet role of Maya Kitajima and her rival Ayumi Himekawa. The manga classic, which tells the angst-ridden trials and tribulations of an aspiring actress, has already been made into two anime television series and a OAV series. A fictional Noh play within the manga has even been recreated by the National Noh Theatre in Tokyo.

Separately, the musical version of the Shōnen Onmyōji supernatural light novels is set to open in Tokyo on October 4. The publicity for this coming-of-age story is making much of the fact that 20 "bishōnen" actors have been cast to play the fighting onmyōji (practitioner of ancient Japanese occultism) and the 10 characters unique to the musical version. The Mainichi Newspapers have posted pictures of the cast in costume. The novels, which also inspired an anime series from Geneon Entertainment USA, follows a boy who inherits his grandfather's onmyōji position to protect the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto.

Source: Ultimatum

Image © 2006 Hikaru Yuuki, Sakura Asagi/Kadokawa Shoten, Shōnen Onmyōji Production Committee