Tokio Confidential
Opening Night: February 5, 2012
Closing: February 19, 2012
Theater: Atlantic Stage Two
Japan, 1879. Isabella Archer, a young American war widow crosses an ocean in search of a lost love–and is about to cross a line from which she can never return. It’s a journey across the boundaries between pleasure and pain, art and artifice, the secrets of the flesh and the sins of the heart.
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February 15, 2012
“Tokio Confidential,” a new musical by Eric Schorr, has plenty to recommend it, not least a plush, inviting score. But Mr. Schorr, who wrote the music, book and lyrics, does his almost comically lurid story no favors by basing several characters’ names on figures in James’s naturalistic masterpiece “The Portrait of a Lady,” even retaining Isabel Archer’s birthplace, Albany.
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February 11, 2012
What do you get when you take a feisty 19th-century Civil War widow, send her to the Land of the Rising Sun and have her fall for a tattoo artist in a show that combines elements of traditional musical and Japanese theater? A big no-Noh. Honestly, the foregoing description makes this tepid East-meets-West romance sound far more interesting than it actually is. Author Eric Schorr has certainly done his homework—Tokio Confidential is filled with factoids about American and Japanese history, mores and culture—but as entertainment, it’s a kamikaze mission.
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February 15, 2012
As delicate as a cherry blossom, “Tokio Confidential” transports us to 19th-century Japan. This lovely chamber musical about a Civil War widow whose life’s transformed by a tattoo artist reveals Eric Schorr, its composer/librettist, as a talent to watch. While the plot ultimately takes a ludicrously Gothic turn, this exotic if problematic work deserves a life beyond this short run.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 11, 2012
I’m still scratching my head over Tokio Confidential, Eric Schorr’s baffling yet intermittently entrancing new musical directed by Johanna McKeon at Atlantic Stage 2. “Bonkers, but interesting,” was how a fellow audience member described the piece as we rode the elevator from the basement theater to the street, and thinking about it, a more apt description of anything I have not heard. After an over-long first half, Schorr completely pulls out the rug and takes the show in a direction that’s so bizarre that, without hyperbole, I don’t think I will ever believe what I saw.
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February 13, 2012
The allusions to the work of Stephen Sondheim — musical, verbal, and visual — pile up with alarming alacrity throughout Eric Schorr’s decidedly unusual chamber musical Tokio Confidential, now at the Atlantic Stage 2. And while the work never fulfills its own ambitions — or comes close to Sondheimian greatness — it has some extremely appealing music and a luminous performance by Jill Paice as definite compensations for its shortcomings.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 12, 2012
If seriousness of purpose and lofty ambitions were enough to guarantee success in the musical theater, then Eric Shorr’s "Tokio Confidential" would be a gem. Unfortunately, Shorr’s artistic reach falls considerably short of his grasp in this thinly written, musically derivative, and ultimately dramatically preposterous work. Despite a spare but stylish production and the efforts of a talented cast and director, this arid show goes nowhere and takes its time in doing it.
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