A stage production based on the novel by Haruki Murakami.
When autumn came, their bodies became covered in long golden hair. Golden in the purest sense, untainted by any other shade. The very essence of the color gold, manifested in this world. They displayed the purest golden hue to be found between heaven and earth. Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; translated from Japanese by Corinne Atlan, Paris, Seuil, “Points,” 2013, p. 22. Philippe Decouflé came to public attention in 1989, during the bicentenary of the French Revolution, when he helped Jean-Paul Goude create the Parisian “Bleu Blanc Goude” parade along the avenue des Champs-Élysées. Three years later, he became artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. Shortly after that event, he met Japanese producer Miyako Kanamori, who commissioned him to adapt the Japanese tale Dora into a musical, first staged in Tokyo in 1996. Twenty years later, Philippe Decouflé created My Name is Shingo in Kanagawa, another musical based on Kazuo Umezu’s science-fiction manga. Then, in 2026, Miyako Kanamori invited Philippe Decouflé to create the first-ever stage adaptation of a novel by Haruki Murakami, one of the world’s most widely read contemporary Japanese writers: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. With the author’s blessing, the French choreographer embarked on creating a total work of art combining theater, music, and dance, drawing on the conventions of musical theater (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, West Side Story…) as well as the Kabuki tradition, an epic form of Japanese theater. Philippe Decouflé directed a company of nine actors and ten dancers in a hybrid production lasting two hours and forty-five minutes, distilling a work of more than seven hundred pages. As both director and choreographer, he shaped the production while seeking the pared-down simplicity required to adapt Haruki Murakami’s novel for the stage. The result is an original form of dialogue in which the main character is split into three entities: “I,” “me,” and “my shadow.” Featuring Japanese star Tatsuya Fujiwara, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a story that unfolds across two parallel worlds. In Tokyo in 1985, a man has lost the love of his life. Set between the protagonist’s life and his dreams, both the novel and the stage production explore our humanity and the fragility of a person wandering through a dystopian, dreamlike world.
Price: From €6 to €59
Source: paris.fr — photo: Marge design