The Takarazuka Revue Company is an all-female theatre that began as the Takarazuka Shōjo Kageki (Takarazuka Girls’ Opera) in 1914 at a spa town near Kobe in western Japan. A cultural venture of Kobayashi Ichizō (1873–1957), the Hankyū Railroad industrialist, the town was planned as a leisure destination for affordable family entertainment; it also featured a botanical garden, zoo, and amusement park. The Takarazuka Gekijō (Takarazuka Theatre) grew into its most popular feature, the only attraction remaining today.

Takarazuka's first performance was Don-Burako, based on the folktale Momotarō (Peach boy), staged in modified kabuki style, one of the first successful operettas employing Western music sung in Japanese. Kobayashi's goals were to establish a modern Japanese musical theatre as well as to change conventional assumptions that the only professional female performers were geisha.

Student professionals

The Takarazuka Music School was established in 1919, with artistic and moral instruction based on Kobayashi's maxim, “Purity, Honesty, Beauty” (Kiyoku, Tadashiku, Utsukushiku). Takarazuka recruited educated, middle-class girls, and trained them as respectable “students” (seito). Today, only girls, from 15 to 18 are allowed to audition for the school; successful candidates must remain unmarried. The school provides two years of training in Western and Japanese performing arts – singing, dancing, and acting. All Takarazuka performers are graduates, performing as “students” and maintaining a strict senior–junior hierarchy throughout their careers.

Each troupe features a top star, usually a male-role performer (otokoyaku) paired with a female lead (musumeyaku). Takarazuka has in-house playwright-directors, composers, and orchestras that include both men and women. The company consists of five troupes of about eighty professional performers each: Flower (1921–), Moon (1921–), Snow (1924–), Star (1933–), and Cosmos (1998–).

Foreign adaptations

Takarazuka has been responsible for introducing many forms of foreign culture to the Japanese public. The 1924 Daigekijō (Grand Theatre, 3,500 seats) featured advanced stage technology (see p. 428). The first Japanese revue, Mon Pari (My Paris, 1927), was followed by the more spectacular Parizetto (Parisette, 1930), which established the Takarazuka revue style. The company produced original scenarios as well as adaptations of foreign works, creating multicultural hybrid spectacles. Music and choreography, derived from flamboyant European revues and American shows, included fast tempos and geometrical choreographic formations. Popular French chansons were indigenized, as were jazz sections and visual extravaganzas in the manner of the Ziegfeld Follies.