Kabuki

This is what wikepedia has to say about kabuki
Kabuki is a form of traditional Japanese theater. Kabuki theater is known for the stylization of its drama and for the elaborate make-up worn by its performers.

The individual kanji characters, from left to right, mean sing, dance and skill. Kabuki is therefore sometimes translated as "the art of singing and dancing." These are, however, ateji, characters that do not reflect actual etymology, and the word kabuki is in fact believed to derive from the verb kabuku, meaning "to lean", or "to be out of the ordinary", hence kabuki can be interpreted to mean "avant-garde" or "bizarre" theatre

CAUTION :- Do this when you have absolutely nothing to do or if you really dig cultural stuff however bizzare it may be.

O.k. The caution is not on wikipedia. That ones's added by me. My reasons for going were simple
1> It was a sunday and i had nothing (better or worse) to do.
2> Ginza, where the theatre is very close to where I am staying.
3> The theme of the play sounded interesting ( Two samurai brothers out for revenge)
4> I was feeling like exploring Japan's cultural side. (New one for me)

Kabuki is not that bad. I was advised to go to an opera instead, but I have left that for something to do in Europe. But after watching kabuki, it made me wonder why i was never interested in KathaKali. Maybe I would have been If I was a tourist in India and had nothing better to do on a sunday. Maybe I should have watched kathakali when it was on t.v during my DD1 days in pune. But I didn't, so I am not in a position to make comparisons. So I am just gonna write about kabuki.

http://www.shochiku.co.jp/play/kabukiza/theater/

Discalimer : - Do not go by everything said in the above link.

I had no problems getting to the place. It was a stone's throw away from ginza station. It is small structure compared to the towers surrounding it. It seems it was rebuilt twice after a bomb and an earthquake. There are two options for watching kabuki. You either go the whole 9 yards, that is 4 and a half hours of four or five different acts or only a single act lasting about 90 minutes or so. Not being the culturally adventurous type, i decided to go for a single act on a sunday matinee show. For the single act, you have to go on the fourth floor which common sense tells you, does not house the best seats for watching a stage show. And in case if anyone's wondering what I was going to do at a cultural japanese play knowing only a few words in japanese, they have english headphones for translating the happenings on stage ( as advertised)

So there I was on a sunday morning, standing in line to get in for the act, trying to make a pass at the french girls ahead of me. At the opening of the window, the ticket guy saw I was lost in Translation and explained a few details to me in his version of english. What i got from it was I could have to stand, which i eventually did, as i refused to run up four flights of stairs for a seat on a sunday and preferred to stand for the next 90 minutes or so. I got my english translation radio from the counter on 4th floor for 1400 yen, 1000 yen of which was a deposit. I had just about enough standing place.

Come to think of it, the reason I was there was that the play was well advertised.It went something like this
Soga Brothers and their father's killers
This is one of the oldest and most calssical of all kabuki plays. In the edo period, every january , plays appeared about the vendetta, carried about the soga brothers Juro and Goro after 18 years of hardship.In soga no Taimen, the brothers confront Kudo suketsune, the man responsible for their father's death. More ceremony than play, it features each of the important kabuki character types, including the bombastic aragato style of Goro and the soft wagato style of Juro.

Well, that sounded intersting. So there i was, standing in the top balcony of the hall(worst seats for a play) waiting for the action to unfold. The play began with the opening ceremony which was about endless. I really do not wish to write much about the rest of it, but let's just say it ended in 90 minutes. All the action was missing, and there was lots of drama. I was half expecting full on wham bam action on stage, but there wasn't any. There were about countless japanese ceremenious, and endless praises sung by each of the characters in each other. The aragato style mentioned above consisted of screaming loudly and the wagato style sounded like the shreiking of a four year old girl. The play could be summed up as the brothers mentioned above getting themselves invited to the villians lunch party and challenging him to fight. All this took 90 minutes. In the end, I was thankful it did'nt take more.
I left sorely dissapointed ( no french girls spotted after the end of the play). But i would not want to discourage anyone from watching kabuki while in japan. Just, don't say you were not warned.