BLYTHE MATSUI holds her arm straight out, hand flat, palm up, while rotating her body. Dressed in a white lace tank top cropped above her navel and camouflage cargo pants rolled up to reveal high-heeled leather boots, the dancer-choreographer and former Laker Girl turns to Mike Moh, an extreme martial arts specialist, and says: "Blade open."
Instead of a music video or black belt challenge, Moh, who has performed stunts with Jackie Chan, and Matsui launch into "Magic to Do" from the musical "Pippin."
"That's a dance step, 'blade open,' " director Tim Dang says, looking on. "That is not in my dance vocabulary."
Dang, artistic director for East West Players, is one of the few people in the room who, at 49, is old enough to have seen Bob Fosse's original 1972 Broadway production of "Pippin." To attract young audiences, he's updating the classic musical with an anime and hip-hop theme.
The idea for East West Players' production, which opens Wednesday, was spurred by good-natured prodding from Stephen Schwartz, the songwriter behind "Pippin," "Godspell" and "Wicked," when he and Dang would see each other at an annual theater conference. "He always ribs me," Dang says, "that East West has done so much Stephen Sondheim, that 'you never do my work -- the other SS.' " Finally, Dang gave in.
Although the show is loosely based on the son of Charlemagne, who ruled in 8th century Europe, the language is contemporary and the music is 1970s pop rock. "Pippin is obviously a contemporary story grafted onto a historical milieu, and when done successfully, sort of both things are happening at once," Schwartz says.
Anachronisms and young men on quests are frequent traits of anime, the American term for Japanese animation, known for its hand-drawn style, big eyes, dramatic lighting and wide variety of genres -- including kids shows as well as porn. Dang's main models were two series by Shinichir{omacronl} Watanabe, the space western "Cowboy Bebop" and the action comedy "Samurai Champloo."
Schwartz is accustomed to reinterpretations of the musical about a young prince who goes into the world to seek his life's purpose, trying out war, politics, sex and even domestic life. "It's not so specifically set in a place and a time that you can't fool around with it," he says by phone from his Connecticut home.
