I Went to See HiGH&LOW in Tokyo. I Left Thinking About the Future of Theatre.

Seeing HiGH&LOW THE Sengoku Gaiden in Tokyo made me think differently about theatre, fandom, and cultural IP. What if we stop thinking in projects and start thinking in worlds?

Kirill Oleshkevich

8/27/20264 min read

This summer, while researching contemporary Japanese performing culture, I went to Tokyo Brillia HALL to see HiGH&LOW. I expected to watch a theatrical production. Instead, I found myself thinking about something much larger: What if the performance itself is no longer the final product?

As a theatre producer, I have spent many years thinking about productions in fairly familiar terms: concept, cast, music, staging, marketing, ticket sales, audience experience. But sitting in the theatre in Tokyo, I began watching not only the stage. I started watching the audience. And that became almost as interesting as the production itself. There were moments when a character appeared, and the audience responded immediately. No long exposition was necessary. Sometimes a costume, a visual motif, a relationship between characters, or simply an entrance seemed enough to activate something that already existed in the spectators' minds. They knew this world. They had arrived at the theatre carrying their own memories, expectations, favorite characters, and emotional connections. The production did not have to build that relationship from zero. It activated a relationship that already existed.

That distinction fascinated me.
In conventional theatre, we often expect the performance to explain its universe to us.

Who are these people?
Why should we care about them?
What relationships connect them?

With HiGH&LOW, I felt a different mechanism at work. For many spectators, the world existed before they entered the auditorium. The performance was another opportunity to enter it. At certain moments, I realized that part of the meaning on stage was being produced not only by actors, directors, and designers, but by the spectators themselves. Recognition became part of the dramaturgy. The audience was not simply receiving the story. It was completing it. For me, this may have been the most interesting observation of the evening.

HiGH&LOW is particularly interesting from a producer's perspective because it does not exist primarily as one theatrical production. It exists across different forms of entertainment and media. And once you start looking at theatre from this perspective, the producer's question changes. Instead of asking: How do we sell this production? We can ask: What role does this production play inside the larger cultural universe? That is a fundamentally different production model.

A film can introduce the world.
Music can extend its emotional identity.
A stage production can make characters physically present.
Live events can strengthen the community around them.
Merchandise can turn emotional attachment into something tangible.
Digital content can keep the audience connected between major releases.
And then another production can reopen the universe again.
Suddenly, the final curtain is not really the end. It is simply another point in a much longer relationship between the audience and the IP.

One of the reasons I went to Japan was to better understand 2.5D theatre - the Japanese phenomenon in which fictional worlds associated with manga, anime, and games acquire a physical stage form. During the trip, I attended several productions and kept returning to the same question: What exactly are audiences coming to experience? Not simply a story. Not simply actors portraying characters. There is something powerful in seeing a world that previously existed through other media suddenly materialize in front of you. HiGH&LOW is particularly interesting because its transmedia architecture is different from a conventional manga-to-stage adaptation. But many of the mechanisms are similar: recognition, embodiment, continuity, fandom, and shared cultural memory. Theatre becomes a place where an existing imaginary world temporarily becomes physical. And when hundreds or thousands of people experience that transformation together, the result is something that streaming cannot reproduce.

Another thing stayed with me after the performance. We sometimes talk about spectacle as if it were something added on top of "real" theatre - choreography, visual effects, costumes, music, large-scale movement. Watching HiGH&LOW reminded me why that distinction can be misleading. Here, spectacle is not simply decoration. It is part of the storytelling language.
Movement communicates hierarchy.
Costume communicates identity.
Music communicates belonging.
Visual style connects the stage to a larger fictional universe.
And the physical energy of the performers communicates something that cannot be transferred completely to another medium. The production does not merely tell us about its world. It makes us feel what that world is supposed to feel like.

I left the theatre thinking as a producer. This was perhaps the most important part of the experience for me personally. I have produced musicals, concerts, festivals and cultural projects for many years. Like many producers, I was trained to think primarily in terms of individual projects.

A musical.
A concert.
A festival.
A book.
A film.
A live event.
But Japanese entertainment culture repeatedly raises another possibility: What if we stop thinking primarily in projects and start thinking in worlds? Then theatre does not compete with film. Music does not compete with theatre. Publishing does not compete with live entertainment. They can become different entrances into the same cultural universe. Of course, not every production should become a franchise. And not every story needs merchandise, films, games, and multiple adaptations. That is not the point. The more important lesson is about continuity.

How does the relationship with the audience begin?
What happens before opening night?
What survives after the curtain closes?
How does a spectator become part of a community?
And how can one cultural experience lead naturally to another?

These are questions I brought home with me from Tokyo. I went to HiGH&LOW expecting to study another Japanese stage production. I left thinking about the architecture of cultural worlds. And as both a producer and researcher, I increasingly believe that understanding this architecture will be one of the most important skills in the future of live entertainment.