There were so many great musical theatre productions on stage in Japan in 2024. Now that the new year has begun, several sources have revealed their picks for the best shows from last year.
So, here are a few different awards and rankings of the top shows of 2024.
(☆ indicates that the production has released a proshot)
Musical Awards Tokyo
Musical Awards Tokyo is a new awards program that just started for 2024. You can see their homepage here. The winners were:
Grand Award: The Ghost and the Lady (new world premiere, Shiki Theatre Company)☆
Composer Fuuki Harumi also won the award for Best Score.
Best Musical – theatres over 500 seats: Come From Away (US/Canada, Japan premiere, Horipro)
(Come From Away also won the Yomiuri Theater Award.)
Best Musical – theatres under 500 seats: Smoke (Korea, revival production)(☆ four proshots were released in Japan in 2019, but those DVDs are now very, very rare. There are also several proshots in Korea).
Musical Magazine
Musical Magazine also published a ranked list of the best productions, as voted by the magazine’s contributing critics. The list includes:
1. The Ghost and the Lady
2. Come From Away
3. In This Corner of the World (new world premiere, Toho)☆
4. Tootsie (US, Japan premiere, Toho)
5. Isabeau(new world premiere, Watanabe Entertainment)☆
6. Fan Letter(Korea, Japan premiere, Toho)
7. RRR × TAKA”R”AZUKA ～√Bheem～ (new world premiere, with music from Indian film source, Takarazuka Star Troupe)☆
8. Terayama Cabaret (seems to be a new world premiere?, Umeda)
9. Navillera (Korea, Japan premiere. Toho)
10. Rent (US, international co-production, Kyodo)
11. The King and I (classic US, new production, Toho)
12. Lion (UK, Japan premiere, Umeda)
13. Frozen Holiday – Snow Troupe 100th Anniversary (Takarazuka Snow Troupe)☆
14. Machida-kun’s World (new world premiere, Toho)
15. Genesis of Wings (new world premiere, Theatre Polyphonic)
16. Unplayed Sonata (new world premiere, Amuse), Three Musketeers (Matsutake & Kuoras), and Death Takes a Holiday (US, Umeda), tied.
19. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (new world premiere, Toho)☆
20. tick, tick… BOOM (US, Toho)
(Half of the top 20 are new world premieres.)
22. The Mouldman Bellringer of Dublin (new world premiere), Big Fish (US, Takarazuka) tied
25. Crash Landing on You (Korea, Takarazuka – this one is based on a famous K-drama).☆
Miracle de Montparnasse, another new world premiere, is at 38.
These are all new productions, including those of musicals that have been staged in Japan before.
They have a separate category for revivals of a previous production, with Les Miserables (Toho) as number 1, Tenpo Year 12 Shakespeare (Toho, ☆ from 2020 ) as number 2, Endless Shock (Toho) as number 3, followed by In the Heights, Phantom of the Opera (Shiki Theatre Company), and Rose of Versailles (☆, Takarazuka). Mozart!(☆, Toho) was number 8, and Moulin Rouge (Toho) was number 10, which surprised me. I thought that those would have been higher, since they’re two of the most popular shows. SONG WRITERS(☆, Toho), an original musical that premiered in 2013, got one vote, tying it with a few other shows at 22.
No votes were given to Cross Road ☆(my personal favorite). If It had gotten any votes, I wonder which category it would have gone into. It had a new director and new sets, but the costumes were mostly the same as in the original 2022 run.
Smoke also did not make their list. Other shows that didn’t make the list include:
The Wil(l)iams of Wiliam and William (Korea, Japan premiere)
In The Burning Darkness (Korea, Japan premiere)
Bats in the Belfry (a new world premiere)☆
The list was voted by a panel of 20 critics, and it looks like the contributors each get 50 votes in the new productions category. It doesn’t look like any one person gave more than 10 votes to any one show, but I don’t know whether or not that’s a rule.
GekiPia
GekiPia, a news site affiliated with the ticket buying service Ticket Pia, also made a list of the top 10 shows of 2024. Their list includes both new productions and revivals (Les Mis, MR!, Endless Shock, In The Heights, Attack on Titan).
- Come From Away
- The Ghost & the Lady
- In This Corner of the World
- Les Miserables
- Death Takes a Holiday
- Moulin Rouge!
- Endless Shock
- In the Heights
- JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
- Attack on Titan☆
Interestingly, Attack on Titan is included here. That production sits in an interesting space between 2.5D and grand musicals. The cast features both 2.5D actors and grand musical actors — a former Takarazuka member played Eren’s mother — as well as 2.5D actors who have been moving more into grand musicals recently, such as Okamiya Kurumu, who played Eren. He’s most famous for playing Tsurumaru Kuninaga in the Touken Ranbu musicals☆, but recently he’s played the leads in grand musicals Romeo et Juliette☆ and 1789: Les Amants de la Bastille, and he will play the lead in Your Lie in April, a manga-based grand musical. But the other thing that makes Attack on Titan stand out is that it toured to New York. The same cast from the Japanese production did four performances at City Center, in Japanese with English supertitles, in October 2024. A revival run was staged in Japan in December, after they returned.
Original Musicals in the Spotlight
The increased presence of original musicals is wonderful. In 2023, a lot of original musicals premiered, including Cesare: Il Creatore che ha distrutto(☆, Meijiza), Vagrant (Meijiza), and Musical Picaresque Lupin (☆,Toho), but despite being wonderful shows, they didn’t make any top 10 lists. I’m glad to see shows like The Ghost and the Lady, In This Corner of the World, and Isabeau on the lists this time.
Do you agree with these rankings? What do you think the best shows on 2024 were? What shows do you wish you could have gotten a chance to see?
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