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Blue Period Manga Gets Stage Play
posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
Kodansha announced on Friday that Tsubasa Yamaguchi's The Blue Period. manga is getting a stage play adaptation. The play will run at The Galaxy Theatre in Tokyo from March 25 through April 3.
The play stars Kurumu Okamiya as Yatora Yaguchi (pictured above). Other cast members include:
- Natsuki Ōsaki as Yotasuke Takahashi
- Shōgo Tazuru as Haruka Hashida
- Karin Takahashi as Maki Kuwana
- Asumi Kikuchi as Maru Mori
- Sayaka Okamura as Masako Saeki
- Yūta Tachibana as Koigakubo
- Hayato as Utashima
- Ikuma Miyagi as Sumida
- Dai Hosho as Mayu Ōba
Kaori Miura is directing the play and Masafumi Hata is writing the script.
Kodansha Comics is publishing the manga in English, and it describes the story:
Yatora is the perfect high school student, with good grades and lots of friends. It's an effortless performance, and, ultimately … a dull one. But he wanders into the art room one day, and a lone painting captures his eye, awakening him to a kind of beauty he never knew. Compelled and consumed, he dives in headfirst—and he's about to learn how savage and unforgiving art can be!
A television anime adaptation had an advance debut on Netflix in Japan on September 25, before premiering on on October 1 on television. Netflix began streaming the anime outside of Japan on October 9, with weekly new episodes.
Yamaguchi launched the manga in Kodansha's Afternoon magazine in June 2017. Kodansha published the manga's 11th compiled book volume on September 22. Kodansha Comics published the fourth volume in English on August 17.
The manga won the 13th Manga Taisho awards in 2020, and was nominated for the awards the previous year. The series was also nominated for the 24th Annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in February 2020, and also ranked at #14 on the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! male readers list in December 2019, and ranked #15 on the same list in December 2020. The manga also won the Best General Manga award in the 44th annual Kodansha Manga Awards in 2020.
Sources: Blue Period stage play's website, Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web
