This Month’s ‘Hana’ is the long-running Kageki column written by former Cosmos Troupe Top Musumeyaku Hizuki Hana.
In this issue she talks about her own journey to understanding the character of Carmen better and the 2024 production starring Hoshizora Misaki and Towaki Sea.
(A few paragraph breaks are added to make it more readable.)
This Month’s Hana
by Hizuki Hana
The other day, I ran into someone who said “I can so empathize with Carmen!”. I was very startled. This is because, among all of the heroines, I simply cannot understand Carmen at all. And then to this person who empathized with Carmen, it was shocking in turn that I couldn’t understand her.
My first encounter with Passion: Jose and Carmen was actually several months before the first production was staged. At the time I was an Upper Student in the Takarazuka Music School. It was in Director Shibata Yukihiro’s class.
He said he was currently deliberating over the climax of his latest new work. The question was, by what means should Jose murder Carmen, he said. A knife, a pistol, his bare hands, or something else… He explained that he was struggling with this because of the meaning each method would hold.
For me, who had joined the Music School as a diehard fan and was rapidly growing up, this was a very enjoyable session, since my mind was able to get really stirred up over the issue. He asked all of us what we thought, and I remember declaring imperiously “I think with his bare hands is best!”
What a intensely passionate young girl.
And then, once the show opened, our class all went on a field trip to watch it, from seats in the very back of the second floor. In the first production of the show, the final murder method was a pistol1. But that wasn’t the real shock for us. It was how things got there. For us…it was incredibly thrilling. We were desperately trying to hold in our hearts’ cries of ‘Aaah!’ and Kya~!!’, and once the show ended we were wrung out.
Maybe my first experience being like that is the reason. To us, it seemed very far away, like fantasy in a way; maybe I internally placed them as people who could never actually exist in real life, and didn’t actually try to understand Carmen at all. She was so different from me, so I didn’t understand.
There are some things in [Jose and Carmen] that are a bit frightening. But I love the music and the choreography and the intensely focused drama, so it’s one of my favorite shows, one that I can watch over and over and keep finding new things.
The woman I mentioned earlier, from our ‘debate on empathizing with Carmen’, is a very mild-natured woman, and if anything I thought she was more like Jose’s fiance Michaela. This made it even more surprising, and I was fascinated. Strangely enough, perhaps because of her influence, the next time I watched Jose and Carmen, the distance between me and Carmen seemed to have suddenly shrunk. And the story I saw now was a life full of surface and underneath, shadow and sunlight, consciousness and unconsciousness, ‘if’… And then when I heard Carmen asserting herself, I thought of the famous line from iconic American tv series Sex and the City, when Samantha says “I love you, but I love me more.”
In the new Jose and Carmen, Hoshizora Misaki plays Carmen. She gives such a cute impression, so I couldn’t imagine how she would communicate the character. She did it with her entire body. She conveyed that raw energy Carmen seems to possess with her whole body. An inherent unearthliness, or even more than that, an energy saying ‘Now! I’m burning with life right now!’ was overflowing in a charisma that was impossible to resist.
And drawn in by that gravitational force was Jose, played by Towaki Sea. Towaki is absolute perfection when playing characters full of anguish. Perhaps it’s because, in her last show, she was giving another wonderful performance as an incredibly cheerful young lord. Perhaps the Carmen Jose stretches his hands out towards in the world after his death is ‘Carmen as Jose desires her’. I wonder what, to Carmen, ‘freedom’ really was.
Unlike before, my fascination with Carmen is now never-ending.
1 – This blocking has altered over the years; in the 2024 version Jose uses a knife.