After 15 years of manga, 675 episodes of anime, 11 feature films, and countless video game adaptations, Naruto is doing what any media empire worth its salt would do: launching a musical version. Well, actually, they’re reviving their stage musical for a brand new run — because that’s just how far ahead of the curve Naruto is. To celebrate its impending return to the theater, the musical, entitled Live Spectacle Naruto, has released a slew of new key visuals of its characters in action.
The newly released key visuals include first looks at characters like Zabuza, the Third Hokaga, Jiraiya, Haku, and Orochimaru. These new images complement the previously released looks at our heroes, Naruto, Sasuka, and Sakura.
You can take a peek at the complete collection of cast photos in our gallery below.
The musical, written and directed by Fairy Tail‘s Akiko Kodama, covers an impressive amount of ground, telling the story from the manga’s beginning through its twenty-seventh volume, which is up until Naruto departs on his three-year training mission with Jiraiya, the arc that transitioned Naruto to Naruto Shippuden. In addition to songs, the play will include a fair amount of dancing and acrobatics, which makes sense given that it’s about elite ninjas.
For those of you completely in the dark about Naruto, it is a long-running manga and anime series that centers on Uzumaki Naruto, a young ninja who aspires to become the Hokage, a title granted to the village leader and the greatest ninja of them all. That is the story at its most simplistic, but things get real crazy, real quick with ninja world wars, assassination plots, demonic possession, and much more. So good luck packing all of that into a single musical.
In 2015, the musical ran from March to May in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Osaka, and Miyagi. It also held performances internationally in Malaysia, Macau, and Singapore. It was also released on DVD for those of us not fortunate enough to snag a ticket.
The new iteration of the musical will run from July 30 through August 7 at Osaka’s Umeda Arts Theater, and from August 13-28 at Tokyo’s AiiA 2.5 Theater Tokyo. The musical is the latest initiative to come from the ongoing “Naruto Shin Jidai Kaimaku Project” (Naruto’s New Era Ongoing Project), an artistic initiative to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the manga, which concluded its run in 2014.
My only question is will there be a Sexy no Jutsu chorus line? Please say yes.
Would you want to see this musical? What other anime deserves a stage adaptation? Let us know in the comments below.
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Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious) and tell him your favorite jutsu.
