It might have been the Winter Garden in 1935. The girls drifted languidly down an outsized ramp while the music came pumping out of the pit like an echo from a Ziegfeld revue. A couple whisked onstage to do a comic turn, punctuated with the oddly archaic slang of the hepcat: "Hey, baby! Let's have a ball!" Occasion : the Manhattan opening of Japan's all-girl Takarazuka Dance Theater, an amalgam of the Folies-Bergere, the Radio City Rockettes, and native Kabuki styles.
Founded four decades ago as a "musical bridge between East and West," Takarazuka...
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