THE MAN FROM THE EAST
[Musical/Japan/Japanese Language/Period] M/LY: Stomu Yamash’ta; S: Takeo
Adachi; L: Mitzuru Ishi; P: Gordon Crowe b/a/w Looner Enterprises, in Stomu
Yamash’ta’s Red Buddha Rock Theatre Production; T: Brooklyn Academy of Music
(OB); 10/23/73-10/28/73 (8)
This touring rock operetta, originating in Tokyo, was a
loosely assembled, hard-to-follow piece about a hunchbacked program seller, his
crippled young female companion, and their odyssey through time from Old Japan
to the holocaust of Hiroshima.
Clive Barnes found it “unintelligible” and choreographically
“inept,” but with several evocative images. One he pointed to showed a group of
townspeople frozen in tableau at the moment of atomic explosion. A piece of “fake”
avant-gardism, The Man from the East,
lacked anything Barnes could cite as original.