It has been announced that Berryz Koubou’s Shimizu Saki, Sudou Maasa, Kumai Yurina & Sugaya Risako, as well as C-ute’s Yajima Maimi, Nakajima Saki and Hagiwara Mai will be performing in an upcoming stage play titled Cat’s Eye based on the manga by popular mangaka Tsukasa Hojo.
For those who might not know what the manga’s story is, it’s about 3 young girls who lost their father who was a famous painter. He had left many art pieces behind and in order to retrieve them, the girls had to wear secret identities by night and became art thieves classified as Cat’s Eye thanks to their charm that the police knows about and to their ability to steal their father’s paintings fast and without ever getting caught, just like cats. During the day, they’d be known as 3 sisters who run a cafe named Cat’s Eye Cafe.
When I first read the news, I was extremely happy about this since there’s no need to mention that the manga as well as the anime adaptation it got were really impressive, and having read and watched them, I can assume that H!P members are a perfect choice to perform those roles of 3 daring young girls who are stealing for a purpose and are infinitely trying not to get caught while dealing with their daily lives, and it is a somewhat big event for the girls since the series and the manga are widely popular among Japanese people from many different age gaps.
The choice of members is also pretty clever since they mixed some of the most popular members like Maimi and Risako with other who are somewhat underrated within their groups, and since we already know that Maimi and Yurina have great acting experience in various movies or stage plays (Ran, Black Angels, Oosama Game), the other girls have also proven to be amazing actresses thanks to their appearances in Oosama Game or their roles in Gekidan Gekiharo.
The girls will form a small group named Cat’s Eye 7 which will sing the theme song of the stage play, and since there is only 3 main heroines in the story being the 3 sisters, it has been announced that there will be 2 different versions of the stage play with the girls playing a role in each, leading to 2 girls having the same role, which might be fun to watch later on and pick which performance one likes better judging on the girl’s acting and chemistry.
Overall, this news is really one of the most interesting this year since this is a really big project and it’s great that H!P members got cast as the main roles, assuming that this stage play will be a big anticipation for fans of the manga/series or for the curious ones as well as H!P fans, so hopefully everyone will be excited about it and we will be waiting for reports when the stage play will be performed!
Hopefully everyone who is in the area at the time can reserve a ticket and attend the stage play since it’s set to be an amazing one thanks to the story and the cast, and hopefully this will also allow both groups to promote for their singles.
The stage play will run from 9/22 till 9/30.
Matan-web article about stage play
Oricon article about stage play
