Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company is bringing back its barnstorming stage adaptation of famed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s hand-drawn 1988 classic My Neighbour Totoro for a second season at London’s Barbican in November.
The show will play 17 weeks at the arts venue located in the capital’s City district from November 21-March 23. It follows an inaugural 15-week run that closed January 21 after playing to record-breaking audiences of more than 130,000, according to data we requested from the RSC.
Director Phelim McDermott told us “that for lots of children” the show was “their first experience of visiting the theater.” But there was another demographic that fascinated him. “There were a lot of video and games enthusiasts, a lot of them in their late teens, who really got into it,” said McDermott, who also is co-founder and co-artistic director of the Improbable theater company.
It’s thought that both the family and the teen audience watched Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli masterworks on Netflix during the pandemic. ”They were switched on to it,” McDermott noted.
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