[Stage Report] 6gatsu no Bitter Orange @ Tokyo Globe Theater, 6/25 6:00pm show
On 6/25, I went to see Shige's play [6gatsu no Bitter Orange]!! It was amazing and a MUST-SEE for any Shige fan! xD
The play only has one stage setting: The inside of a typical Japanese home with tatami, sliding doors, a round living room table, and some shelves in the back. There's also some walking area to designate "outside" the house.
It starts in pitch darkness. Then we hear Shige's voice asking, "How long do I have to keep my eyes closed? Do we have to do this?" and a woman's voice saying "it's the only way" and that he can either keep his eyes closed or she can turn off the lights. Shige (Tatsuya... but it's more fun to refer to him as Shige) chooses to turn off the lights, which actually turn on for the audience and we can see Shige for the first time in a blue dress shirt and khaki dress pants (his main outfit for the whole play.. he looks amazing BTW, love this hairstyle on him!!).
The woman (who we later find out is named "Mai") tells him she wants to hear his life story, from the very beginning. Shige tells her of the day he was born, and how his father was a doctor. However, they were not especially rich because it was a small country town. He also talks about his brother, Naoki (Tokio's Joshima Shigeru), 15 years his elder.
We go through a series of flashbacks, where Shige is a little boy living with his parents and older brother in a small town. Their house has a big bitter orange (DaiDai) tree, which people often mistake for being mikan (tangerines). In the flashbacks, it's established that Naoki's kind of a screw-up, while Shige is a well-rounded, smart kid who's good at everything. Naoki isn't really good at anything, ends up going to a party school in Nagasaki(?), but eventually coming home and saying he's going to become a singer-songwriter in Tokyo. At one point, Naoki teaches Shige the guitar and shows him a list of songs he's working on with titles like "I'm sorry I was born" and other long-winded random titles, haha. This is where we get to see Shige play the guitar (not bad!) and in a short matter of time, he is much better than his brother xD
Throughout the flashbacks, their father is constantly disapproving of Naoki's lifestyle. At one point, the father tells Shige he should pretend he doesn't have an older brother anymore, but a girly sister named NaoKO. Later on, Naoki jokingly enters a beauty contest dressed as a woman and it ends up in the local paper. This angers his father, who tells Naoki he's an embarrassment and kicks him out of the house for good.
Later on, in a sad turn of events, Shige's mother is killed in a car accident. However, the local police officer (Noguchi) secretly tells Shige that it wasn't an accident, it was suicide. He informs Shige that 1. his mother was holding a hand-written note that said "I'm so embarrassed, I can't live anymore" and 2. Naoki is actually Shige's HALF-brother, born from another mother. Shige is plagued by these secrets throughout the play.
After the mother's death, their father starts drinking heavily and quits his job as a doctor, saying he'll become a farmer instead. One night, Shige catches his father with another woman - Naoki's real mother. In anger, Shige tells the woman that she ruined his mother's life and he wants her never to see his father again.
Shige eventually goes to college and graduates, and we're back in the present with him talking to Mai. He tells Mai that he received a letter about his father's declining health, and is returning home.
When Shige gets home, he's surprised to find his father boisterously drinking with a woman in a kimono (at this point we only see the back of her head). He's even more surprised when the woman turns around, and it's actually his brother, Naoki!! For some reason, Naoki and his father are now getting along peachily, and his father doesn't seem to be showing any signs of being sick.
However, the unfortunate truth is that their father IS dying; he has cancer and only a month left to live. His father has already written his will. But his father brushes off the topic and refuses to talk seriously about it.
Later, Naoki and Shige are surprised when their father introduces them to a young woman named Kaori, who he says he'll be marrying. Kaori is even younger than Naoki, so of course the brothers disapprove. Noguchi (the police man from earlier), suggests that she may be a con woman, out to get half of the family's inheritance, meaning the brothers will only get 1/4 each... or possibly none at all. A hilarious scene ensues when Naoki insists that he and Shige must expose Kaori as a con artist. Shige refuses and tries to run away, only to have Naoki knock him down and yank him by the foot trying to get him to agree to participate xD
At some point (I'm probably getting a lot of the order wrong), a suspicious man named Nakagawa shows up. He's followed Naoki from Tokyo, probably to collect money. However, he also has a strange interest in Shige. When Shige's not around, Nakagawa reveals to Noguchi and Naoki that in Tokyo, he went to a club (? I assumed it was a hostess club, but I may be wrong) and fell in love with a woman named Mai. One day, he followed her home ("so you're a stalker?!" "No, I was just hanging around so I could run into her and be like 'oh! what a coincidence!" "...so you are a stalker") and saw her go into an apartment but never come out. So he decided to ring the doorbell, only to have Shige come out and answer it! Nakagawa asked Shige if a woman named Mai lived here, but Shige vehemently denied it. Noguchi remembers overhearing Shige on the phone talking to a "Mai-chan" which makes everyone suspicious... who is she and why is Shige keeping her a secret?
Noguchi decides to take matters into his own hands by re-dialing the last number on the house phone. It connects to Mai, so Noguchi tells her that he's a family friend and that Shige has been seriously injured in a car accident and has been calling her name the whole time. He convinces Mai to come to the town and meet him at the train station. He also steals Shige's cell phone in case Mai tries to contact him.
Meanwhile, Kaori comes back to the house alone, so Naoki and Noguchi start grilling her. (Shige also comes back out.) They ask when she met the father, if she really loves him, and if she really doesn't care that he's only got a month left to live. She tells them that she met their father at the hospital while she was visiting her mother. After her mother died, their father comforted her and that's when they fell in love and he asked her to marry him. She retells a story that their father told her about the bitter orange tree in front of the house: Every year, the oranges turn green before becoming bitter oranges. Their father said it's like getting to "reset" your life, and that's exactly what he wants to do with Kaori. Reset his life and enjoy the last month of his life with her. Kaori insists she just wants the same thing. After Naoki finishes grilling her, he tells Shige to help questioning Kaori, but Shige is silent. He opens his mouth, about to say something, but in the end no words come out. So the questioning ends, and Kaori leaves the house again but not before telling Shige, "you probably don't remember, but we've met before." Shige doesn't know what she's talking about, but leaves the house to clear his head.
Naoki is mad that Shige didn't bother to say anything to Kaori. However, Noguchi tells Naoki that Shige has a strange disorder that appeared after Naoki was kicked out of the house... Shige can't talk to women!! Whenever a woman is present, he clams up. But then Naoki questions, what about Mai?, who Shige seems to talking to perfectly fine on the phone and possibly living with. Then Noguchi recalls getting a phone call from Shige while he was in college, where Shige seemed extremely excited, saying "it's strange" but he's "found a way" to cure his disorder, but was vague on the details.
Unfortunately I can't remember where this fits in, but at one point, it's revealed that their father co-signed for a friend's debt. That friend recently passed away, so the father is now left with the debt which is now twice the amount of the original loan. If their father dies, the brothers will be left to pay the loan. To prevent this, their father announces that he has written them out of the will - meaning they will get none of the family's inheritance and thus none of the debt. Naoki is baffled when he realizes his inheritance is ZERO... but at least his debt is also ZERO! .. but basically he's back to where he started.
Anyway, people leave the house and Noguchi realizes it's time to meet Mai at the train station. Hearing that Mai will be coming, Nakagawa comes back to the house, only to be informed that she'll be at the station, so he runs to meet her there. There's a hilarious back and forth where Mai shows up at the house, only to be told to go back to the station; meanwhile Nakagawa also runs to the station, only to hear Mai is at the house, so he runs back and forth trying to catch her but never does xD Finally, Mai goes to the house alone to see Shige, knowing that Noguchi's been lying to her the whole time. Mai asks Shige a bunch of questions as to what's been happening, but Shige can't talk in front of a woman and thus can only gesture wildly to her. Mai can't make out what he's trying to explain, so suggests phones, but Noguchi still has Shige's... so she says, "ok, I guess we'll have to use THAT again" Shige agrees and goes into a backroom to prepare for whatever "THAT" is.
While Shige is gone, Nakagawa and Noguchi finally arrive back at the house to meet Mai. Nakagawa is relieved that he'll finally get to see her, but when Noguchi introduces Mai to him, Nakagawa says it's not her. "Mai is prettier, taller, thinner, with voluminous hair!" Under her breath, the real Mai says "dammit, I said to quit using my name," and Nakagawa asks if she knows the "Mai" that he's in love with. She says yes, she's at the station! Which forces Nakagawa to run to the station yet again xD Noguchi also leaves the house.
When everyone's left the house and it's only Mai, she calls back to Shige and tells him it's clear. So Shige comes back out... DRESSED AS A GIRL!! He's got a long pink flowerly dress on, a short brown wig, and makeup on!! (HE'S SO GORGEOUS! XD) Apparently, he can only talk to women if he's dressed like a woman!! Mai scolds him for using her name when she told him not to, and he apologizes. Then, in that outfit, he starts telling Mai everything that's been happening xD
From this point on, everything starts to come together (although it's kind of jumbled for me, so sorry if the order is wrong).
The family returns to the house much to Shige's chagrin. Shige spins around in his dress wondering what to do (SO FUNNY) and backs up into a corner. The family enters and wonder who the extra woman is in the house. Mai introduces Shige as her friend..."Tatsuko" Shige says Hello in a girl-voice and tucks his head back into to a corner, trying to hide his face. Meanwhile, Naoki, Kaori, and their father start arguing about Kaori possibly being a con artist - and Naoki reveals that Kaori is actually his (half-)sister!! Can his father really marry his sister? Yes, it's weird but Kaori explains that her mother slept with many men, but the only one she really loved was Naoki's father. When her mother died, Kaori met the man her mother loved and fell in love with him too.
Naoki gets mad, and (I can't remember exactly what the connection was but) he brings up their mother (Shige's mother, the one who died in a car accident) and how she would feel about this, which angers Shige. He finally turns around from the corner he's hiding in and starts yelling, "What do you know about how Mom felt?!". Everyone is shocked that Shige is there, in a DRESS, but Shige continues yelling in anger. He says that Naoki is the real embarrassment, causing his mother to commit suicide, and mentions the note that she was holding during her death.
Naoki is shocked to hear this, and asks Shige if he's kept this to himself all these years. Shige nods and stands there crying (still in a dress ^^;). Naoki then tells Shige that he's mistaken, their mother was always supportive of him. Even though Naoki wasn't her biological son, she loved him as her own and told him that "your father and I, we're your parents." She even gave him money to go to Tokyo and follow his dreams as a singer-songwriter. He reveals that he was told by a record producer in Tokyo that he'd be able to release a debut single... titled "I'm so embarrassed, I can't live anymore" (the same thing that was written on the note their mother was holding when she died). Still in tears, Shige asks, but then why was it in HER handwriting? Apparently Naoki had told their mother his debut single would be released, so she wrote down the title intending to reserve it at a local CD store. The CD of course, was never actually released.
As things start to wind down, Nakagawa finally shows back up at the house after running back and forth from the station, to find his beautiful "Mai-chan" at the house!! He goes up to Shige about to confess his love, but Shige stops him and blurts out "I'm sorry!!" in his regular man voice, then strips off the wig and dress to reveal that he is actually.. Shige!! (well, duh) To which we finally get an explanation of why Shige is in drag: In college, there was a school event where the guys dressed as girls for fun... but it was there that Shige realized that if he was dressed like a girl, he could suddenly talk to women! So he kept doing it and even landed a job working while dressed as a woman. He introduces Mai as his counselor, who has been trying to help his disorder.
I can't remember what they start talking about afterwards, but one point, Mai chimes in and Shige responds and keeps talking... to which Mai realizes that Shige has just talked to her without being dressed like a girl! Shige is also in shock. Mai explains that Shige has just experienced huge catharsis: All these years he's thought that 1. dressing like a girl was a bad thing since his brother got kicked out of the house for doing so and 2. his mother committed suicide. But now that he found out his mother didn't actually commit suicide and his father and brother have patched things up, a mental block has been lifted and Shige can deal with his affliction!
They decide to check if he's really cured by having him talk to Kaori. It comes out slowly, but Shige manages to ask her what she meant when she told him "we've met before." Kaori asks Shige if she remembers the day he caught his father with another woman, and yelled at that woman to never see his father again. He nods, and Kaori reveals to Shige that she was there that day when he said mean things to her mother. However, she doesn't hold a grudge about it. Now, she just wants to enjoy the last month she has with their father.
The brothers finally accept their father's relationship with Kaori, and ask her to take care of him. They eventually get married, and later, their father passes away. The brothers and Kaori continue to live in the house and clean things up, but one day Kaori disappears with all the money in the family's account. Shige still has issues talking to women, though he can now comfortably talk to Mai and Kaori. He decides to stay at the house and become a farmer like his father. Mai shows up and tells Shige she quit her job as a counselor and now needs a place to stay. Naoki announces that they have room and she can come live with them! Mai happily accepts and announces that she'll be a farmer too! Shige acts surprised but grins, and Naoki is baffled that his little brother has beat him at love too. The play ends with Mai looking at the bitter orange tree and saying "wow, look at those mikan" and the two brothers responding in unison, "they're DaiDai!"
---
Sorry the report is so long-winded, there were a lot of plot twists! To summarize all the twists:
-Naoki is actually born from a different mother, making him Shige's half-brother.
-Kaori is Naoki's half-sister; same mother but different father.
-The father co-signed a loan for a friend, and that debt will be passed on to the brothers. To prevent this, the father wrote them out of the will.
-However, Kaori still steals the family money straight from the bank account in the end.
-Shige thinks his mother's death was a suicide because of a note she was holding, but it turns out the note was just the title of his brother's "debut single"
-Shige has an affliction where he can't talk to women face-to-face. Mai is his counselor helping him to deal with it.
-There is one solution for Shige's affliction: cross-dressing!! Shige discovers he can talk to women if he's dressed like one. He starts doing so, and uses Mai's name as an alias for his girl persona.
---
After the play, Shige and the cast came out a few times for bows and audience calls. Shige didn't really say much, just thanked the audience and apologized for it starting late (they delayed it about 10 minutes because there was an accident on the Yamanote line). During the last call, we all yelled "SHIGE!!" and he gave a cute smile. Overall though, I was kind of disappointed he didn't talk to the audience more since it was the last night show in Tokyo, but maybe the show running late cut into MC time.
Overall, it was a good play! There were a lot of funny moments and interesting plot twists. I definitely did not expect at all to get to see Shige in a dress!!! And now I'm sad I didn't plan to see this play more than once (unless I chase him down to Osaka...hmmmmmm ^^;). Besides getting to see Shige, the other actors in the play were also awesome. Joshima-san was amazingly hilarious, and so were the actors who played Noguchi and Nakagawa!
The play goods were cute: pamphlet and a Shige scrap notebook!! Complete with Shige-stickers and cute pictures of Shige in the notebook :) There were also other goods like a postcard set that one of the actors designed (Joshima-san? I didn't look carefully).
Pictures of the goods
The play only has one stage setting: The inside of a typical Japanese home with tatami, sliding doors, a round living room table, and some shelves in the back. There's also some walking area to designate "outside" the house.
It starts in pitch darkness. Then we hear Shige's voice asking, "How long do I have to keep my eyes closed? Do we have to do this?" and a woman's voice saying "it's the only way" and that he can either keep his eyes closed or she can turn off the lights. Shige (Tatsuya... but it's more fun to refer to him as Shige) chooses to turn off the lights, which actually turn on for the audience and we can see Shige for the first time in a blue dress shirt and khaki dress pants (his main outfit for the whole play.. he looks amazing BTW, love this hairstyle on him!!).
The woman (who we later find out is named "Mai") tells him she wants to hear his life story, from the very beginning. Shige tells her of the day he was born, and how his father was a doctor. However, they were not especially rich because it was a small country town. He also talks about his brother, Naoki (Tokio's Joshima Shigeru), 15 years his elder.
We go through a series of flashbacks, where Shige is a little boy living with his parents and older brother in a small town. Their house has a big bitter orange (DaiDai) tree, which people often mistake for being mikan (tangerines). In the flashbacks, it's established that Naoki's kind of a screw-up, while Shige is a well-rounded, smart kid who's good at everything. Naoki isn't really good at anything, ends up going to a party school in Nagasaki(?), but eventually coming home and saying he's going to become a singer-songwriter in Tokyo. At one point, Naoki teaches Shige the guitar and shows him a list of songs he's working on with titles like "I'm sorry I was born" and other long-winded random titles, haha. This is where we get to see Shige play the guitar (not bad!) and in a short matter of time, he is much better than his brother xD
Throughout the flashbacks, their father is constantly disapproving of Naoki's lifestyle. At one point, the father tells Shige he should pretend he doesn't have an older brother anymore, but a girly sister named NaoKO. Later on, Naoki jokingly enters a beauty contest dressed as a woman and it ends up in the local paper. This angers his father, who tells Naoki he's an embarrassment and kicks him out of the house for good.
Later on, in a sad turn of events, Shige's mother is killed in a car accident. However, the local police officer (Noguchi) secretly tells Shige that it wasn't an accident, it was suicide. He informs Shige that 1. his mother was holding a hand-written note that said "I'm so embarrassed, I can't live anymore" and 2. Naoki is actually Shige's HALF-brother, born from another mother. Shige is plagued by these secrets throughout the play.
After the mother's death, their father starts drinking heavily and quits his job as a doctor, saying he'll become a farmer instead. One night, Shige catches his father with another woman - Naoki's real mother. In anger, Shige tells the woman that she ruined his mother's life and he wants her never to see his father again.
Shige eventually goes to college and graduates, and we're back in the present with him talking to Mai. He tells Mai that he received a letter about his father's declining health, and is returning home.
When Shige gets home, he's surprised to find his father boisterously drinking with a woman in a kimono (at this point we only see the back of her head). He's even more surprised when the woman turns around, and it's actually his brother, Naoki!! For some reason, Naoki and his father are now getting along peachily, and his father doesn't seem to be showing any signs of being sick.
However, the unfortunate truth is that their father IS dying; he has cancer and only a month left to live. His father has already written his will. But his father brushes off the topic and refuses to talk seriously about it.
Later, Naoki and Shige are surprised when their father introduces them to a young woman named Kaori, who he says he'll be marrying. Kaori is even younger than Naoki, so of course the brothers disapprove. Noguchi (the police man from earlier), suggests that she may be a con woman, out to get half of the family's inheritance, meaning the brothers will only get 1/4 each... or possibly none at all. A hilarious scene ensues when Naoki insists that he and Shige must expose Kaori as a con artist. Shige refuses and tries to run away, only to have Naoki knock him down and yank him by the foot trying to get him to agree to participate xD
At some point (I'm probably getting a lot of the order wrong), a suspicious man named Nakagawa shows up. He's followed Naoki from Tokyo, probably to collect money. However, he also has a strange interest in Shige. When Shige's not around, Nakagawa reveals to Noguchi and Naoki that in Tokyo, he went to a club (? I assumed it was a hostess club, but I may be wrong) and fell in love with a woman named Mai. One day, he followed her home ("so you're a stalker?!" "No, I was just hanging around so I could run into her and be like 'oh! what a coincidence!" "...so you are a stalker") and saw her go into an apartment but never come out. So he decided to ring the doorbell, only to have Shige come out and answer it! Nakagawa asked Shige if a woman named Mai lived here, but Shige vehemently denied it. Noguchi remembers overhearing Shige on the phone talking to a "Mai-chan" which makes everyone suspicious... who is she and why is Shige keeping her a secret?
Noguchi decides to take matters into his own hands by re-dialing the last number on the house phone. It connects to Mai, so Noguchi tells her that he's a family friend and that Shige has been seriously injured in a car accident and has been calling her name the whole time. He convinces Mai to come to the town and meet him at the train station. He also steals Shige's cell phone in case Mai tries to contact him.
Meanwhile, Kaori comes back to the house alone, so Naoki and Noguchi start grilling her. (Shige also comes back out.) They ask when she met the father, if she really loves him, and if she really doesn't care that he's only got a month left to live. She tells them that she met their father at the hospital while she was visiting her mother. After her mother died, their father comforted her and that's when they fell in love and he asked her to marry him. She retells a story that their father told her about the bitter orange tree in front of the house: Every year, the oranges turn green before becoming bitter oranges. Their father said it's like getting to "reset" your life, and that's exactly what he wants to do with Kaori. Reset his life and enjoy the last month of his life with her. Kaori insists she just wants the same thing. After Naoki finishes grilling her, he tells Shige to help questioning Kaori, but Shige is silent. He opens his mouth, about to say something, but in the end no words come out. So the questioning ends, and Kaori leaves the house again but not before telling Shige, "you probably don't remember, but we've met before." Shige doesn't know what she's talking about, but leaves the house to clear his head.
Naoki is mad that Shige didn't bother to say anything to Kaori. However, Noguchi tells Naoki that Shige has a strange disorder that appeared after Naoki was kicked out of the house... Shige can't talk to women!! Whenever a woman is present, he clams up. But then Naoki questions, what about Mai?, who Shige seems to talking to perfectly fine on the phone and possibly living with. Then Noguchi recalls getting a phone call from Shige while he was in college, where Shige seemed extremely excited, saying "it's strange" but he's "found a way" to cure his disorder, but was vague on the details.
Unfortunately I can't remember where this fits in, but at one point, it's revealed that their father co-signed for a friend's debt. That friend recently passed away, so the father is now left with the debt which is now twice the amount of the original loan. If their father dies, the brothers will be left to pay the loan. To prevent this, their father announces that he has written them out of the will - meaning they will get none of the family's inheritance and thus none of the debt. Naoki is baffled when he realizes his inheritance is ZERO... but at least his debt is also ZERO! .. but basically he's back to where he started.
Anyway, people leave the house and Noguchi realizes it's time to meet Mai at the train station. Hearing that Mai will be coming, Nakagawa comes back to the house, only to be informed that she'll be at the station, so he runs to meet her there. There's a hilarious back and forth where Mai shows up at the house, only to be told to go back to the station; meanwhile Nakagawa also runs to the station, only to hear Mai is at the house, so he runs back and forth trying to catch her but never does xD Finally, Mai goes to the house alone to see Shige, knowing that Noguchi's been lying to her the whole time. Mai asks Shige a bunch of questions as to what's been happening, but Shige can't talk in front of a woman and thus can only gesture wildly to her. Mai can't make out what he's trying to explain, so suggests phones, but Noguchi still has Shige's... so she says, "ok, I guess we'll have to use THAT again" Shige agrees and goes into a backroom to prepare for whatever "THAT" is.
While Shige is gone, Nakagawa and Noguchi finally arrive back at the house to meet Mai. Nakagawa is relieved that he'll finally get to see her, but when Noguchi introduces Mai to him, Nakagawa says it's not her. "Mai is prettier, taller, thinner, with voluminous hair!" Under her breath, the real Mai says "dammit, I said to quit using my name," and Nakagawa asks if she knows the "Mai" that he's in love with. She says yes, she's at the station! Which forces Nakagawa to run to the station yet again xD Noguchi also leaves the house.
When everyone's left the house and it's only Mai, she calls back to Shige and tells him it's clear. So Shige comes back out... DRESSED AS A GIRL!! He's got a long pink flowerly dress on, a short brown wig, and makeup on!! (HE'S SO GORGEOUS! XD) Apparently, he can only talk to women if he's dressed like a woman!! Mai scolds him for using her name when she told him not to, and he apologizes. Then, in that outfit, he starts telling Mai everything that's been happening xD
From this point on, everything starts to come together (although it's kind of jumbled for me, so sorry if the order is wrong).
The family returns to the house much to Shige's chagrin. Shige spins around in his dress wondering what to do (SO FUNNY) and backs up into a corner. The family enters and wonder who the extra woman is in the house. Mai introduces Shige as her friend..."Tatsuko" Shige says Hello in a girl-voice and tucks his head back into to a corner, trying to hide his face. Meanwhile, Naoki, Kaori, and their father start arguing about Kaori possibly being a con artist - and Naoki reveals that Kaori is actually his (half-)sister!! Can his father really marry his sister? Yes, it's weird but Kaori explains that her mother slept with many men, but the only one she really loved was Naoki's father. When her mother died, Kaori met the man her mother loved and fell in love with him too.
Naoki gets mad, and (I can't remember exactly what the connection was but) he brings up their mother (Shige's mother, the one who died in a car accident) and how she would feel about this, which angers Shige. He finally turns around from the corner he's hiding in and starts yelling, "What do you know about how Mom felt?!". Everyone is shocked that Shige is there, in a DRESS, but Shige continues yelling in anger. He says that Naoki is the real embarrassment, causing his mother to commit suicide, and mentions the note that she was holding during her death.
Naoki is shocked to hear this, and asks Shige if he's kept this to himself all these years. Shige nods and stands there crying (still in a dress ^^;). Naoki then tells Shige that he's mistaken, their mother was always supportive of him. Even though Naoki wasn't her biological son, she loved him as her own and told him that "your father and I, we're your parents." She even gave him money to go to Tokyo and follow his dreams as a singer-songwriter. He reveals that he was told by a record producer in Tokyo that he'd be able to release a debut single... titled "I'm so embarrassed, I can't live anymore" (the same thing that was written on the note their mother was holding when she died). Still in tears, Shige asks, but then why was it in HER handwriting? Apparently Naoki had told their mother his debut single would be released, so she wrote down the title intending to reserve it at a local CD store. The CD of course, was never actually released.
As things start to wind down, Nakagawa finally shows back up at the house after running back and forth from the station, to find his beautiful "Mai-chan" at the house!! He goes up to Shige about to confess his love, but Shige stops him and blurts out "I'm sorry!!" in his regular man voice, then strips off the wig and dress to reveal that he is actually.. Shige!! (well, duh) To which we finally get an explanation of why Shige is in drag: In college, there was a school event where the guys dressed as girls for fun... but it was there that Shige realized that if he was dressed like a girl, he could suddenly talk to women! So he kept doing it and even landed a job working while dressed as a woman. He introduces Mai as his counselor, who has been trying to help his disorder.
I can't remember what they start talking about afterwards, but one point, Mai chimes in and Shige responds and keeps talking... to which Mai realizes that Shige has just talked to her without being dressed like a girl! Shige is also in shock. Mai explains that Shige has just experienced huge catharsis: All these years he's thought that 1. dressing like a girl was a bad thing since his brother got kicked out of the house for doing so and 2. his mother committed suicide. But now that he found out his mother didn't actually commit suicide and his father and brother have patched things up, a mental block has been lifted and Shige can deal with his affliction!
They decide to check if he's really cured by having him talk to Kaori. It comes out slowly, but Shige manages to ask her what she meant when she told him "we've met before." Kaori asks Shige if she remembers the day he caught his father with another woman, and yelled at that woman to never see his father again. He nods, and Kaori reveals to Shige that she was there that day when he said mean things to her mother. However, she doesn't hold a grudge about it. Now, she just wants to enjoy the last month she has with their father.
The brothers finally accept their father's relationship with Kaori, and ask her to take care of him. They eventually get married, and later, their father passes away. The brothers and Kaori continue to live in the house and clean things up, but one day Kaori disappears with all the money in the family's account. Shige still has issues talking to women, though he can now comfortably talk to Mai and Kaori. He decides to stay at the house and become a farmer like his father. Mai shows up and tells Shige she quit her job as a counselor and now needs a place to stay. Naoki announces that they have room and she can come live with them! Mai happily accepts and announces that she'll be a farmer too! Shige acts surprised but grins, and Naoki is baffled that his little brother has beat him at love too. The play ends with Mai looking at the bitter orange tree and saying "wow, look at those mikan" and the two brothers responding in unison, "they're DaiDai!"
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Sorry the report is so long-winded, there were a lot of plot twists! To summarize all the twists:
-Naoki is actually born from a different mother, making him Shige's half-brother.
-Kaori is Naoki's half-sister; same mother but different father.
-The father co-signed a loan for a friend, and that debt will be passed on to the brothers. To prevent this, the father wrote them out of the will.
-However, Kaori still steals the family money straight from the bank account in the end.
-Shige thinks his mother's death was a suicide because of a note she was holding, but it turns out the note was just the title of his brother's "debut single"
-Shige has an affliction where he can't talk to women face-to-face. Mai is his counselor helping him to deal with it.
-There is one solution for Shige's affliction: cross-dressing!! Shige discovers he can talk to women if he's dressed like one. He starts doing so, and uses Mai's name as an alias for his girl persona.
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After the play, Shige and the cast came out a few times for bows and audience calls. Shige didn't really say much, just thanked the audience and apologized for it starting late (they delayed it about 10 minutes because there was an accident on the Yamanote line). During the last call, we all yelled "SHIGE!!" and he gave a cute smile. Overall though, I was kind of disappointed he didn't talk to the audience more since it was the last night show in Tokyo, but maybe the show running late cut into MC time.
Overall, it was a good play! There were a lot of funny moments and interesting plot twists. I definitely did not expect at all to get to see Shige in a dress!!! And now I'm sad I didn't plan to see this play more than once (unless I chase him down to Osaka...hmmmmmm ^^;). Besides getting to see Shige, the other actors in the play were also awesome. Joshima-san was amazingly hilarious, and so were the actors who played Noguchi and Nakagawa!
The play goods were cute: pamphlet and a Shige scrap notebook!! Complete with Shige-stickers and cute pictures of Shige in the notebook :) There were also other goods like a postcard set that one of the actors designed (Joshima-san? I didn't look carefully).
Pictures of the goods