Dream Girls

DREAM GIRLS opens a door into the spectacular world of the Takarazuka Revue, a highly successful Japanese musical theater company in which all of the players are women. Takarazuka was founded in 1914, at the final stop of a provincial railway line near Osaka, by the railroad's director, who hoped to provide an incentive to ridership. An inversion of the traditional all-male theater in Japan (Kabuki or Noh), it was the first to introduce to Japan Western popular classics like "Oklahoma" and "West Side Story."

Each year, thousands of girls apply to enter the Takarazuka Music School. The few who are accepted endure years of a highly disciplined and reclusive existence before they can join the Revue. Students spend their first two years kowtowing to the seniors in elaborate hazing rituals--they're made to clean keyholes with Q-Tips, for example--before they can begin rehearsing, at which point each chooses whether to play male or female roles. Once on stage, the performers draw on Western models to create a fantasy world in which "men" are always handsome and sensitive, women are invariably glamorous, and love is unquestionably grand.

Takarazuka Revue performances are sold out months in advance, and millions of Japanese women adore the romantic heroes, idolizing them like heartthrob pop stars. They deluge these "men" with love letters and tokens of affection. But their passion, the film suggests, is hysterical rather than erotic. The Revue provides fantasy alternatives to the depressing reality of the average Japanese husband, who--the women say--is coarse, work-obsessed, and unromantic. Paradoxically, the directors of the Takarazuka School (all of whom are male) insist that the training is good preparation for marriage: those who play female roles learn how to be properly subservient to men, while those who play males will be better able to anticipate their husbands' needs. Interviews with performers and fans are interwoven with footage of life at the school, which ranges from near-obsessive cleaning duties to onstage gliding and preening in formal evening wear.

Although the film's attitude to the school is superficially respectful, there's a deadpan satiric undertone. The British/Japanese production, directed by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, amusingly captures the high-camp spirit of the proceedings (the visual thrill of kitsch romantic musicals, or Japanese housewives screaming, Beatlemania-style, for teenaged women in drag, is hard to resist), but DREAM GIRLS also provides a thought-provoking critique of a highly industrialized but still remarkably sexist culture. The Takarazuka Revue, once dismissed as empty, Vegas-style entertainment, is now being reclaimed by cultural and gender theorists as a revealing microcosm of gender relations in contemporary Japan. leave a comment