Customer Reviews

Musical

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This is essentially the equivalent of an original cast album for the Morning Musume stage musical, "Love Century," performed in Japan in early 2001. Morning Musume is an all-girl J-pop group that does lots of live concerts and promo videos, but also the occasional stage musical, such as this one and a later one performed in 2002, "Morning Town." The Region 2 DVD of the full performance of "Love Century" is 144 min. but this CD contains only 38 min. of material: 21 of the 29 numbers offered in the show. Four of the omitted songs are in the body of the show and the other four are among the group's greatest hits (including "Renai Revolution 21" and "Love Machine") making up the final act concert which closes with a big finale (included on the CD) by all the cast. I'm guessing that the numbers omitted from the body of the show were left out because they were incomplete or reprises of earlier songs. I'm also guessing that the group's pre-existing hits were omitted for contractual reasons. Even so, had all the omitted numbers been included, the CD would be a lot more valuable to fans and potential fans outside of Japan.

The songs performed in a Morning Musume musical tend to be quite short, hence the short running time for 21 songs. Some of the songs here are performed by other members of the large stage cast and are part of the show's narrative. Those songs actually performed by Morning Musume or other members of Hello!Project (the umbrella show biz troupe that includes MM) will, of course, have the most appeal to fans. Most of the individual MM members get solo numbers, although the liveliest and catchiest are the ones they sing together. Maki Goto performs a hiphop-inflected solo and joins other H!P members, Mika Todd and Ayaka Kimura from Coconuts Musume, and Atsuko Inaba, for a winning number in English, "I Love New York City," which, needless to say, won this New Yorker over immediately. Because the songs and their personnel are listed in Japanese on the CD case, those who can't read Japanese can't identify which artists do which solo numbers. Having cross-checked the CD with the DVD of the show I can tell you that the following girls do solos on the CD: Ai Kago, Maki Goto, Kei Yasuda, Natsumi Abe, Mari Yaguchi, Yuko Nakazawa, Kaori Iida, and Rika Ishikawa.

For most fans, I would argue that the original DVD with the entire stage show is the way to go. Even in an unsubtitled version, it's a lot of fun for diehard MM fans, giving us the chance to see the girls not only sing and dance, but act as well. And they all do a fine job. I can't exactly explain the storyline in any detail because I don't have access to an English-language synopsis, but it has to do with an amusement park, Century Land, that's about to close and the efforts of a group of girls to come up with a suitable closing number for the park's final show. Maki plays an aspiring hiphopper with a disapproving mother. She is recruited to add some hiphop style to the other girls' big number, leading to some amusing scenes of her working them to exhaustion in practice.

This is my first Morning Musume review and hopefully not the last. I would love to see more MM material find its way into the U.S through normal distribution channels. The group started in 1997 with five members, grew to 16 at one point and is now 10-strong (having "graduated" older members over the years and recruited new ones, with ages ranging from late adolescence to early 20s). The girls put out a steady stream of promotional videos, concert DVDs, and DVD/CD singles and they appear in a regular weekly TV series called "Hello Morning." They're particularly fun to watch in the concert DVDs, where they perform elaborate and exciting song-and-dance numbers mixing elements of pop, disco, hiphop and other musical styles. There's an old-fashioned (in the best sense of the word) "let's put on a show" quality to their numbers, an aura of upbeat positive energy that represents quite a fresh contrast to the narcissism and hostility that underscore so much American popular music these days.