Sage

The majority of files in this folder are recorded from Takarazuka's cable TV channel, Sky Stage. This means that some notable shows may be missing due to them rarely or never being aired on the channel because of copyright.

Even that aside, Takarazuka's history of filming performances goes back almost half a century, even including files I have chosen not to upload I by no means have a complete collection.

Besides performances that I simply don't have recordings of on hand, here are various criteria for inclusion or exclusion of recordings in the collection:

• No shows containing blackface or brownface are included. Unfortunately, mild skin-darkening makeup in general is almost unavoidable, actresses playing for example "dangerous" or "lower class" characters will throw some color on their face willy nilly even if they're playing a Japanese character. So please be mindful that suspect and potentially uncomfortable makeup may still occur. I haven't watched every single performance proper, and I've had to manually skim a lot of recordings to filter for this, so please let me know if I have missed any cases and accidentally included a blackface show in the collection. But obvious things such as:
  • Grand Hotel,
  • Ocean's 11,
  • Om Shanti Om,
  • Gone with the Wind,
  • Miscellaneous cringe American history shows like For the People,
  • 2000s stagings of "classic" Takarazuka shows like Sorrowful Cordoba that take place in Spain and in older stagings did not feature bad makeup but modern Takarazuka has decided that Spanish people are brown,
  • And Don Juan and "Latin revues" for that same reason,
are of course excluded entirely.

• Shows that heavily feature offensive imagery or objectionable subjects framed in a romantic lens. Just a blanket disclaimer that I have removed some egregiously gross things I'm aware of that nobody would be interested in watching anyway, like that one Ishida Masaya directed play about a doctor falling in love with his child patient and how beautiful and romantic it is.
• I have limited storage space, so some arbitrary cuts are made:
  • Generally, only one recording per performance is included. Disc recordings are prioritized for plays and musical, last day recordings are prioritized for revues, NHK recordings are prioritized for older shows.
  • I exclude a lot of "small theater" performances. Just because casual fans are probably most interested in grand theater, full troupe top star performances. Things like Bow Hall junior actress dance recitals are fun but maybe not the most interesting for people who aren't that invested in the theater or actresses. Of course, once you go back to years where small theater performances were more common overall, more will be included.
  • Concerts and Dinner Shows are not included. This collection is mainly interested in sharing theater.
  • Cosmos shows are excluded unless particularly notable or potentially interesting for a casual viewer. Cosmos troupe has very recently been involved in an extremely awful event which may lead many people to not want to watch their shows anyway, see more under the abuse section if you want to know. If any performance is still included in the selection that heavily features Cosmos stars from the 2020s I've noted them with additional CWs.

In general, I recommend using Takawiki to read up on performance information and do things like look up other shows by a director that interested you. It's not a great website, but it's basically the only website in English for looking up these things.

If you have absolutely 0 knowledge of Takarazuka and the performances they've put on, I've compiled various suggestions and recommendations of things to watch, some personal favorites, some simply "this is based on a property a western viewer might be familiar with."

If you've read the previous sections, you'll have learned that Takarazuka still to this day makes use of blackface. It is not unique in this regard within the Japanese theater space, but it's still an embarrassing reality of the theater. This practice will likely continue for many years into the future as there has still been no pushback in wider Japanese theater culture on this subject, and Takarazuka continues to happily put on "latin revues" regularly where entire troupes coat themselves in orange brown makeup for latin-themed song and dance shows, and whenever a character of color or even just an italian shows up in a play the actress will put on gross makeup to play the part.

In general, the theater is also extremely regressive and conservative. It's a common reflex to describe Takarazuka as "lesbian" theater due to all actors on stage being afab, but the company, directors, staff and actresses themselves are largely heavily conservative. On stage, it's not unusual at all to see homophobic and transphobic writing and gags coming from the the majority old, male directing staff. Misogyny also permeates through the theater's whole history, starting with its roots as a school intended to train women in "modesty, fairness and grace" so that they can become good wives, all the way into the present where the theater's entire selling point is the male-designated otokoyaku. Musumeyaku are shoved into the background, given far less promotion and opportunities for career advancement than otokoyaku, if a female character is "too important" an otokoyaku will be cast in the role, and textually, entire scripts are heavily rewritten to center male characters more than female characters.

There are of course non-het and non-cis actresses who have worked within the company, and incorporated aspects of their identity into their performances, Todoroki Yu being a well-known example, but please don't mistake the theater as a progressive space due to the lack of visible cis men on stage.

Actress Aria Kii, 25 years old, took her life in September 2023 after a long period of forced overtime from the company and bullying and abuse from other actresses in her troupe.

I will not go into this specific incident more than that, you can easily find news articles in English on this subject, as it's the most high profile case of this nature in the company's history and is seeing decent coverage as it should.

The troupe in question was the Cosmos Troupe. Long known within gossip circles to be the most egregious environment for this bullying and overwork culture within the theater, however this culture permeates every troupe and the whole company and has done so for the entire history of the theater. It is well known that once accepted into the theater's training school, actresses spend every waking hour serving the theater and are paid pennies for their time. Working actresses rarely get even a day's vacation between show runs, and abuse and infighting between actresses to assert superiority and to get ahead in the mainly money and sales-driven internal hierarchy is commonplace.

Additional reading (Even in Japanese, you'll have to turn to gossip sites for the majority of sources on these subjects, but in English the amount of sources existing at all is pitiful, apologies for the poor quality of the links)
96th Class Lawsuit incident [1] [2]
Higashi Koyuki's experiences with abuse within the company [1]