Shiki Theatre Company Wins the Award for 4 Consecutive Years
The Boy and the Beast by Shiki Theatre Company won the Best Musical Award. With this, Shiki Theatre Company becomes winner for four consecutive years, namely with An American in Paris (2019), A Robot in the Garden (2020), Frozen (2021), and The Boy and the Beast. It is probably by coincidence that new musical works from Broadway and Shiki’s original musicals are scoring a tie, but it feels somewhat symbolic of the current musical theatre industry. The Boy and the Beast is a musical stage adaptation of Mamoru Hosoda’s hit animated film of the same title. It is a story of a lonely boy who slips into another world and grows up with a beast as a father, where both father and son grow up and develop a bond between each other. Themes such as diversity, bonding, and identity emerge from this adventure story that has a sense of scale. The script which cleverly adapts the original animation film and includes textures of the characters that were not in the original work, is superb. Chikae Takahashi worked on this and was selected as winner of the Staff Award. Moreover, Toby Olié was selected as winner of the Staff Award for enabling the eye surprising and vivid transformation sequences in the fight scenes where Soshi, the master of the beast world is decided.