INTERVIEW: Spirited Away Stage Director Discusses Meeting Miyazaki and Adapting a Classic Anime Film
English stage writer and director John Caird never actually expected to meet Hayao Miyazaki, even if the former was interested in creating a production of what many consider to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away. Miyazaki, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, is notoriously hard to reach but, more importantly, remains a fairly active presence in his company despite having previously announced his retirement. “I was told that I wouldn’t be meeting him. I’d be meeting just (Ghibli co-founder and anime producer) Toshio Suzuki,” Caird recalled. “So I sat down with Toshio to talk about the idea and then Hayao came into the room. And Toshio was surprised — He didn’t think he was going to come in either.”
It was there that Caird, a former director with the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, met a side of Miyazaki which is far from the curmudgeon he’s often painted as in pop culture. “We had a lovely hour together, chatting about the play and how it would work and what I imagined it to be like,” said Caird. “Hayao was so interesting, just talking with Toshio Suzuki about their memories of creating the film and what inspired them to make changes in the process.” By the end, Caird was able to move forward with his own stage rendition of Spirited Away, but the production for it was far from simple.
Caird had initially chosen the project because, having done frequent work in Japan, it was a show that might fill the Imperial Theater. Toho, one of the show’s producers, owns the location, and with a 1,900 seat auditorium, Caird had to pursue something that was less “intimate” (He’d previously put on Les Miserables there.) A long-time admirer of Miyazaki’s work and Spirited Away in particular, he believed that it could fill the theater: “The interesting thing about it, dramatically, is that it’s really one location. It’s basically about a bathhouse and if you can find a way to put a bathhouse on stage, then you’ve solved 90% of the story.”
In the lead up to meeting Miyazaki and after, all the way to rehearsals, Caird attempted to watch nearly everything he ever directed, all the way back to Future Boy Conan. “The great thing about Miyazaki’s work is that it’s full of wit,” Caird explained. “His worlds are complicated and funny and witty, and he never creates a character that he’s not personally interested in. It gave me a lot of courage in approaching him because he writes characters that are great for actors to perform.” If Caird could bring that to life on stage — the energy that Miyazaki imbued in Spirited Away which turned it into one of the most lauded animated films of all time — he’d have a good chance of capturing what made it special.
Caird had eight weeks to pull it off.
“It’s not long for a show that complex,” Caird explained, and upon seeing the finished product, it turned the entire production into a kind of miracle. The experience is truly lavish, with a myriad of costumes and rotating set pieces, puppets and lighting work that can both reduce or expand the size of the setting at will. Coordinating a group of actors would’ve been tricky enough, but Caird’s production had to replicate the fantasy of Spirited Away as best they could, and that meant coordinating such feats as Yubaba’s immense face or No-Face’s gluttonous form or the gigantic Stink Spirit.“That was difficult,” said Caird. “You want something massive, but it’s also got to be something that a single dancer can move inside and feel free and not be dangerous.”
Caird certainly had the experience necessary to tackle such a complicated process, but he had rarely done anything quite like Spirited Away especially since COVID restrictions kept the crew not just separate, but often in different time zones. “I was directing in Tokyo, Jon Bausor, the set designer, Toby Olie, the puppet designer, Sarah Wright, the associate puppet designer, were all Zooming into rehearsal from London, which is a nine hour time difference. And Brad Haak, who re-orchestrated Joe Hisaishi’s music, was Zooming in from Chicago,”said Caird. Working in brief moments of overlap, the time crunch was only compounded by numerous COVID scares, which forced temporary shutdowns of production and shaved off another ten days from rehearsal time.
“Every performer had to wear a mask,”said Caird. “I didn’t know what the performers looked like until dress rehearsal. It was so challenging.”
A blend of creative ingenuity and unbreakable work ethic paid off — The show, whether you’re watching the “Kanna” or “Mone” versions (named after the two actresses who play the lead role of Chihiro in each) is delightful, something that manages to serve as both adaptation and tribute to the original film as Caird kept the dramaturgy mostly intact. “My designers and I endlessly studied the iconography of the movie, what was in the background and the things that we thought fans would hate if they weren’t there,” said Caird. “Or perhaps things that people haven’t even noticed in the movie that we’ll really show in the theater version. Because when you adapt a Miyazaki film for the theater, you’re working with imagery. He’s telling a story through imagery.”
Caird is unsure if Miyazaki himself ever saw the production, but Studio Ghibli isn’t just the work of one man. Along with Toshio Suzuki watching and being “very complimentary,” Caird and his team held a special dress rehearsal for the entire Ghibli animation studio. There, around two hundred staff members got to see their most famous work be transformed into beautiful theater, a testament to Spirited Away’s power as a work of fiction. “They adored it,” Caird remembers, “because they could see their work being revered. They were thrilled.”
GKIDS will release the theatrical screenings of the stage play beginning on April 23, with extra releases on April 25, April 27 and May 2.
Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter! His book, Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught A Generation To Catch Them All, is available wherever books are sold.
