Honorable Rockettes

As the electric train slides into the station 30 miles northwest of Osaka, the pretty conductress announces the last stop in a falsetto singsong: "Finally, honorable passengers, your patience is rewarded.

At last we have reached Takarazuka, a unique town dedicated to laughter, spectacle and melody." For 30 yen (8-c-) the travelers can stare at the town's zoo, flock through its botanical gardens, jitterbug on its spring-mounted dance floor, or get married in its Shinto chapel. But the main event is the big show in the rambling, 4,000-seat theater--a rare, sukiyaki-like mixture of the Folies Bergeres, Radio City Music Hall, the Metropolitan Opera and native Kabuki. It is the Japanese teenagers' most popular musical entertainment.

For 3 1/2 hours the audience's eyes can take in as many as 30 separate sets, gaily worked in paper, while the ears are assailed by age-old Kabuki tunes in Broadway orchestrations and such Western song hits as Oh! My Papa with Japanese lyrics.

The stage is populated entirely by girls, acting in the stylized gestures of Kabuki but dancing Western style and singing everything from high soprano to near-baritone. The voices are often first-rate.

The musical revues they perform have paper-thin plots that are traditional in the beginning, but undergo metamorphoses as the show wears on. Even such a popular set piece as the famed Kabuki Lion Dance gets a startling new tail twist: it starts off traditionally with a dancer in a furry, tasseled leonine head, but in the end scores of Takarazuka girls, dressed as butterflies in tight leotards and wings, abandon their fluttering and go into a high-kicking routine to rival the Rockettes.

Glamorous Aura. Four decades ago a businessman named Ichizo Kobayashi became president of the 30-mile-long electric railway from Osaka to Takarazuka (Treasure Mound). To improve his road's languishing business, he decided that he needed a major attraction at the end of the line, began to convert the terminal town into a super music hall. For a stage he covered a swimming pool with boards.

For talent he recruited the daughters of well-to-do families. Takarazuka flourished in the '305, but it was not till after World War II that it really came into full bloom. Today Takarazuka is a thriving city of 35,000, and the railway (also serving other suburban stops) carries some 700,000 passengers a day. Two of the four Takarazuka troupes (named Snow. Moon, Flower, Star) stay at home, while the others tour the rest of Japan. Showman Kobayashi, now a multimillionaire, also owns theaters, restaurants, a baseball club and a movie company.

Some of the 350 Takarazuka girls are daughters of early members. They live in the Takarazuka Operatic School for Girls, which fatherly Impresario Kobayashi runs with a strict, decorous hand (no dating, pupils to leave the school only in pairs, weekday curfew at 7). To teach them their musical trade, the girls are given a solid year of voice, ballet, Japanese Western dancing, English. After a year, they are graduated to the chorus (pay: 10,000 yen a month, or $27.77). The 30 stars make ten times that much. The girls wear blue jeans, sweaters, and horsetail hairdos in school, do their own housekeeping and live by a motto:'"Be pure, be right, be beautiful." Their glamorous aura of unattainableness makes them idols to millions of Japanese fans.

Truckin' Chorus. Impresario Kobayashi originally wrote his own scripts from Japanese fairy tales and familiar Kabuki and Noh plots, got his musicians to adapt traditional music to two-step and waltz rhythms. "I was trying to build a musical bridge between East and West," he says.

Today his scouts roam New York City and Paris to acquire tunes and lyrics. Step-for-step dance routines from Oklahoma! and On the Town have turned up among such confections as Broadway Cinderella.

Kobayashi has also staged a musical version of Hamlet and an adaptation of Carmen. His production of Turandot, Puccini's Italianate tragedy of the Orient, became a vehicle for a truckin' chorus.

Today, 82 and frail. Kobayashi rarely leaves his villa near Takarazuka. except for a monthly visit to his theater. Next day he sends cryptic memos to the directors. He still manages to keep his musical empire humming, brings eminent Western concert stars to the town (e.g., Singers Marian Anderson and Helen Traubel, Violinist Yehudi Menuhin). Early this year, he will repossess Takarazuka's Tokyo branch, which the occupation forces had turned into the famed Ernie Pyle movie theater. Last week the old showman ventured forth to take in a special show with a Christmas finale. Sample lyric:

Jinguru berru Jinguni berru Jinguru aru wei.

Owa fun itsu rai In na won hosu opu swei--Hey!

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.