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There are a few things that New York theatergoers can always expect to see on Broadway stages: some Disney, some Sondheim, some Hollywood stars. One may not expect to see the Colossal Titan.
What is the Colossal Titan? That would be a giant, skinless humanoid creature, all red tendons and exposed ligaments, that has a taste for humans. This is basic knowledge, of course, for the legions of fans of “Attack on Titan,” the internationally popular Japanese manga that takes place in a dystopian world where people live in a penned-in society hidden behind towering walls.
About 2,000 of those fans, many dressed as their favorite characters, filled New York City Center to see “Attack on Titan: The Musical” on the first night of its recent run earlier this month. This particular brand of manga-based onstage entertainment, and the fans who enjoy it, may at first seem like a novelty, but that’s only true in America — and perhaps only for the moment. In Japan, anime plays and musicals are omnipresent.
Three sold-out performances later, it was easy to think that maybe the center of a Venn diagram between anime fandom and theater fandom is not as tiny or unusual a space as it may at first seem. Broadway presently banks on pop culture, already established intellectual properties and the fans who invest in them; the success of this performance of “Titan” made it possible to see a future in which anime doesn’t once again get mis-characterized as niche, or separate from mainstream culture, but rather as part of it.
In other words, who’s to say that in a few years, anime won’t be another standard sight on Broadway?
For now, it’s still uncommon to see what unfolded onstage earlier this month. Each time a titan appeared, it was a spectacle. Some materialized on a digital backdrop, crushing buildings and people below. Others were massive puppets, requiring a small battalion of coordinated handlers. And then there was the Colossal Titan, rendered with an inflatable head and arms.
When the titans weren’t drawing the audience’s attention, the huge ensemble (a cast of more than 30 actors) put on an impressive show all its own. The choreography incorporated a dizzying number of vastly different styles, so the soft, graceful long lines of contemporary dance in one scene were juxtaposed with back flips and headspins in another. (The director, Go Ueki, a former world champion in break dancing, used his breaking techniques, and many of his former breaking buddies, in the production.)
The choreography wasn’t limited to the ground; the soldiers in “Attack on Titan” use “vertical maneuvering equipment” involving gas tanks and wires to Cirque-du-Soleil their way up to the titans’ height for attack. So, too, did the actors get hooked in and fly up over the stage, flipping in the air and slicing at the titans on the screen.
There were vestiges of traditional musical theater craft here. Some of the townspeople ensemble numbers recalled the somber balladeering of “Les Misérables.” And the performances were palpably larger-than-life in the way only live stage acting can be. When a character experiences grief, it is operatic, screaming, fall-to-your-knees grief.
Still, to an American audience, anime may seem like a peculiar choice of source material for a stage musical even though anime stage plays and musicals been have spread to the West in the last few years.
In 2019, “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon,” based on the popular magical-girl manga, played a sold-out run at the PlayStation Theater in New York. Last spring, Studio Ghibli’s Oscar-winning film “Spirited Away,” by Hayao Miyazaki, took to the stage at the London Coliseum with impressive large-scale puppetry to depict the colorful spirits of the story. And this summer a musical version of “Your Lie in April,” a heartbreaking manga about a young pianist dealing with grief and new love, also opened in London.
There’s more to these shows than the novelty of the material; many of the adaptations come in the form of a new kind of stage experience, called 2.5-D musicals. These productions are somewhere between the 2-D world of manga, anime and video games, and traditional live entertainment, using projections, digital screens, puppetry and any variety of special effects to create a hybrid viewing experience.
At the first performance of “Attack on Titan: The Musical,” every time a fan favorite took to the stage, audience members erupted into giddy cheers and giggles. The amount of applause that followed the introduction of characters like the weak-but-brilliant Armin Arlert or the food-obsessed Sasha Blouse was on par with what greets the most revered Broadway veterans. And when, for the last number, audiences were invited to take out their phones, the crowd was illuminated by the lights of cellphones recording the stage.
When Ueki reflected on bringing this production to New York for its international premiere, he spoke of Broadway with the admiration of a fan, which he is. He is also a stage veteran, having performed in Japanese productions of a couple of his favorite Broadway shows, “The Music Man” and “Footloose.”
“The reason I got involved in this business is that I’ve been coming to Broadway and seeing a lot of shows and I’d been feeling that one day I want to show these New York theatergoers my piece — that was my goal,” Ueki told The New York Times, via an interpreter. “At the same time, I realized that Japanese anime and manga have been really accepted throughout the world, especially in the States, and so I felt that combining those two I might be able to deliver what the fans here are looking for.”
After all, who’s to say what Broadway can and can’t look like? A few decades ago, pop adaptations like “Beetlejuice” and “Back to the Future” would have seemed just as far-fetched to fans used to such fare as “Guys and Dolls” and “My Fair Lady.”
These 2.5-D musicals aren’t just hybrids of 2-D and 3-D entertainment; they’re also hybrids of what many may consider a highbrow art form (theater) and lowbrow pop fandom (anime). Productions like “Attack on Titan: The Musical” diversify the content we see on stages, challenging our definitions of highbrow and lowbrow culture. That’s one way to get a fresh, new theatergoing crowd — people of different cultures, races and ages, wearing cosplay and cheering together — into often exclusionary spaces like live theater. Popular culture is always changing. Broadway shouldn’t be any different.
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