How do you tell good Kabuki from bad Kabuki? Chances are, you know it when you see it, and New Yorkers have been seeing more of the Japanese art — with its heavily stylized movement and cross-dressing male actors — in the last decade, via Heisei Nakamura-za.
The venerable Japanese troupe kicked off the Lincoln Center Festival and its third NY appearance Monday with “Kaidan Chibusa No Enoki (The Ghost Tale of the Wet Nurse Tree),” a rollicking melodrama based on a 19th-century ghost tale.
The story concerns a villainous samurai (Nakamura Shido II) who murders a famed artist because he covets his beautiful wife. In a tour-de-force turn, Nakamura Kankuro VI, one of the sons of the troupe’s late founder, assumes three roles: the artist, who returns as a ghost; his hapless servant and a thief. Nakamura Shichinosuke II, the founder’s other son, plays the preyed-upon wife.
Simultaneous English translation, delivered via headsets, help you keep track of the convoluted plot, while the action frequently spills into the aisles. Rife with exotic costumes and eye-pleasing sets, the production is gorgeous. There’s even a gushing waterfall — those seated in the first few rows will be given rain ponchos — site of a prolonged battle to the death between the thief and servant, both of them played by Kankuro, with lightning-fast costume changes and body doubles.
Good Kabuki or not, it’s a brilliant bit of theater.