Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Sailor Moon’ Stage Musical to Play North American Tour (EXCLUSIVE)
A Japanese musical adaptation of the hit manga and anime franchise “Sailor Moon” will launch a North American tour this spring, playing nearly 20 cities on a route that begins in Pittsburgh in March and ends in New York City the following month.
The tour for “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live” marks the longest sustained U.S. engagement of a Japanese stage show based on a popular manga or anime, following the head-turning success last fall of “Attack On Titan: The Musical,” which played a sold-out, three-day run at New York City Center in October.
“Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live” is part of a growing, increasingly profitable musical theater trend in Japan, where live stage musicals based on popular manga and anime have become more and more common. Such shows are generally referred to as “2.5D musicals,” a moniker embraced by the genre’s creators and producers as a nod to the two-dimensional manga and anime that inspire these shows.
With 2.5D musicals gaining significant momentum at the Japanese box office in recent years, international producers are hoping the genre can find similar success in the U.S. and abroad.
For producers Makoto Matsuda (of Japanese production company appare) and Kumiko Yoshii (of New York-based Gorgeous Entertainment), “Sailor Moon” serves as a follow-up to the success of their New York production of “Attack on Titan: The Musical.” That show sold some 9,000 tickets across its three-day, four-performance run in October.
“I had been confident the show would do well in New York, but our success was even beyond what we imagined,” Yoshii said.
As was the case with “Attack on Titan,” “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon” will be performed in Japanese with English supertitles. In addition to the North American tour, a separate production of the “Sailor Moon” musical will play 43 performances in London in February.
One of several Japanese musicals based on the popular “Sailor Moon” franchise, “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live” — based loosely on the manga’s Dark Kingdom story arc — premiered in Tokyo in 2018, played Paris later that year and had brief runs in Washington, D.C., and New York City in 2019.
After launching with a preview performance in Pittsburgh on March 12, the upcoming North American tour will officially open March 15 in Austin, where the show plays in partnership with South by Southwest. After stops in cities including Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee, the tour wraps up April 25-26 in New York, where the “Sailor Moon” musical will play a return engagement at the Palladium Times Square Theater.
“Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon,” commonly called “Sailor Moon” in the U.S., follows a group of girls with magical powers who protect the Earth from the forces of evil. With 46 million copies of the manga in print, “Sailor Moon” has been translated into 17 languages and inspired two anime adaptations and a live-action TV series seen in some 40 countries.
The book and lyrics of the musical adaptation are by Kaori Miura (“Musical: The Prince of Tennis,” “Tokyo Revengers The Musical”), who also directs, with music by Go Sakabe and KYOHEI and choreography by Satomi Toma.
Tickets for the U.S. engagement of “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live” go on sale Jan. 31.
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