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PLUTO by Takashi Nagasaki6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() So with all that in mind you can understand my surprise when it was announced that Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki’s Pluto was going to get a fairly lavish, high-budget stage version courtesy of the Barbican, which played across three dates in the London theatre (originally built for the Royal Shakespeare Company) this past week.įor those unfamiliar, the manga is a modern-day retelling of an old Astro Boy story, a murder-mystery wherein an android detective investigates the killings of some of the most powerful robots in existence, suspecting he and the Mighty Atom (as Astro is called in his native Japan) might be next on the hit list. They just tend to fly a little more beneath the radar, as was the case when the smaller Southwark Playhouse’s brought the feudal furry Japan Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo to life in 2014, thanks to some top-notch costuming and make-up work. Which isn’t to say page-to-stage adaptations are completely unheard of. There are the odd examples of blockbuster stage translations of comics - a musical version of Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical Fun Home transfers to London’s Young Vic this summer after a Tony award-winning run off-Broadway, and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was a stuntman-crippling shambles yet it set records for week one ticket sales - but otherwise you don’t see Marvel, Image or DC dominating TKTS booths the same way that they do the multiplexes and bookshelves. Everyone appears to have accepted cinematic adaptations of comic books as totally natural, but the theatre is another matter. ![]()
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