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Boys Over Flowers Musical's Cast Revealed
posted on by Karen Ressler
This year's 18th issue of Shueisha's Margaret magazine will reveal the cast for the stage musical adaptation of Yōko Kamio's Boys Over Flowers (Hana Yori Dango) manga on Thursday.
Ririka Katō (center, in picture above) was chosen from among 3,000 participants in a country-wide open audition play the lead character Tsukushi Makino. The leading male cast members are:
- Ryuuji Kamiyama as Akira Mimasaka (top left)
- Mackenyu as Sōjirō Nishikado (bottom left)
- Jin Shirasu as Rui Hanasawa (center top)
- Yūya Matsushita as Tsukasa Dōmyōji (right)
Yumi Suzuki is directing the play, Gō Aoki is writing the script, and Akimitsu Honma is composing the music.
The play will open in Tokyo in January 2016.
The original Boys Over Flowers manga followed 16-year old Tsukushi Makino, a bright girl from a middle-class family who gets accepted into the ultra elite Eitoku Academy. She finds herself on the bad side of the school's F4, the four most elite male members at the school. The manga has more than 64 million copies in print.
The manga had already been adapted into Japanese anime, a 1995 Japanese live-action film, and a more well-known 2005 Japanese television drama which spawned a sequel and a hit film. Taiwan also remade the manga into a live-action university drama titled Meteor Garden. Crunchyroll streamed a Korean live-action adaptation in 2011. Viz Media released the manga and anime versions in North America.
Since Boys Over Flowers ended in 2004, Kamio drew two side stories in 2006 and 2007. Kamio debuted the Boys Over Flowers Season 2 manga in Shueisha's Shonen Jump+ digital magazine on February 15. The series is titled Hana Nochi Hare ~HanaDan~ Next Season (Flowers, Then Sunny Skies ~Boys Over Flowers~ Next Season) in Japan. The story is set at Eitoku Academy two years after the legendary F4 group graduated and follows the next generation of characters.
Viz Media is publishing the sequel manga in English as a free simultaneous digital release.
