Akatsuki Chisei: this year's Hatsumoude Poster Model

This is Akatsuki Chisei (暁千星) and she's this year's Hatsumoude Poster Model.
Wondering what that is?

Every year the Hankyu corporation picks a couple of people who will go to the first visit to the shrine on behalf of the company and feature in a series of posters.
One of these people is always a Takarasienne who has debuted during the past year, usually the one who has graduated at the top of her class. The 'siennes who are chosen to be Hatsumoude Poster Model usually go on to have a brilliant career, e.g. Hanafusa Mari, Yuzuki Reon, Misaki Rion...
You can find a full list here.

These past weeks the Hankyu Railway stations walls are covered in these posters, and this picture also features on the front page of TOKK (a free information paper published by the Hankyu Hanshin Toho group).

Akatsuki Chisei debuted in Brilliant Days / Climax (Cosmos troupe) and was also featured in JIN / Gold Spark (Snow troupe).
She has not been assigned to a troupe yet (like all other Takarasiennes who graduated in 2012).
It's completely unrelated to Takarazuka, but it might be interesting: she is the daughter of a former pro baseball player (Yamauchi Kazuhiro).

I am looking forward to see how she improves and grows, and I wish her all the best for her Zuka career!

In TOKK was also featured an interview. I hope to get time to translate it soon :)

DRACULA

Uff... it's been a while since I last wrote on here!

Sorry for the absence!

While I was away from the blog, I finally managed to watch a show that I had been wanting to watch for quite some time.

It's not actually Takarazuka, but it's linked to it: the Japanese version of DRACULA, starring Wao Youka and Hanafusa Mari (and also Natsumi Abe, who previously was part of Morning Musume).

The show was very good, though I must (reluctantly) admit, that I liked Wao better back in the Zuka days.

Still, the show is definitely worth watching.

I honestly think it's awesome that the golden combi Wao-Hanafusa is still active even though their Takarazuka days are over. No matter what the reason behind it might be, I love that.

I also found out something pretty interesting in an interview with Wao regarding this show: apparently Frank Wildhorn was keeping the part especially for her.

Since this is not a Takarazuka show, there wasn't any need for the main male character to be played by a woman... and yet he picked her.

Most of you probably already know this, but Frank Wildhorn and Wao had met in 2006 because of her last show as a top star, Never Say Goodbye (an incredibly good show in my humble opioion), which was written by Frank Wildhorn himself especially for the occasion.

That was already a great honour, but I believe it's an even greater honour that he kept the role of Dracula for her up til 2011. Apparently (according to the interview I mentioned earlier), Frank Wildhorn had already talked about having Wao as Dracula back in her top star days.

At any rate, Wao makes without doubt a pretty good Dracula and her skills are impressive, even though, as I already pointed out, I wouldn't put it among my favourite performances.

Still, I encourage you to watch it if you have not watched it yet!

Here you can find a video of one song of the show(WARNING: this might be a spoiler!)

And this is the first part of the interview I mentioned earlier.

If you feel like watching this musical, you can find it on tudou.com ... if you can't find it, let me know and I'll help you out!