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This June marked Angela and mine FIFTH wedding anniversary… and quite a memorable and exhausting five years it has been.  To celebrate, here living on the outskirts of Tokyo, we went to see a unique a production of an English play performed in Japanese.  Since I met Angela, she has always been a fan of musicals, and have accompanied her to live performances of RENT and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  While I usually tolerate the show for her sake, I was blown away by the Japanese production of CATS.  In the past year a theatre company teamed up with Canon (the camera/printer company) to fund and construct a building specifically to house the CATS musical.  The Canon CATS Theatre takes up prime real estate in downtown Yokohama, with its own train station, and has at least one showing per day since it opened last Fall.  Since it plays so often, the theatre does not have to be that large and makes any seat you purchase close to the stage.  With the building constructed specially  for CATS, the entire auditorium is decorated like a junk yard (setting for the musical), complete with a circular, revolving stage.  We bought what we thought were expensive but good seats not realizing any seat was good, and was excited to find out we were only a few rows from the stage.  While I usually daydream a bit in musicals, I was very entertained and could follow the story, mostly, though it was all in Japanese.  I had never seen CATS, and did not realize how much ballet type dancing was in it.  Mostly I was impressed by the crowd interaction the performers had, at one point grabbing an audience member for a dance routine.  There was only one point in the show I found myself a little lost as to what was happening, but overall had a good time and recommend seeing CATS in a foreign language.  After the show we went to a quiet Japanese restaurant and had tempura and noodles. 

I love my wife and can’t believe all we have been through in five years!