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Gegege no Kitaro Gets New Stage Play in August

The official X (formerly Twitter) account for the stage play adaptation of Shigeru Mizuki's GeGeGe no Kitarō manga revealed that a new stage play will run in August. The play will run at the Meiji-za theater in Tokyo from August 2-16 and at the Shin Kabuki-za theater in Osaka from August 18-25.

Yasuyuki Tsutsumi is the new director and scriptwriter.

The play will star:

• Yoshihiko Aramaki as GeGeGe no Kitarō (reprising role)
• Sumire Uesaka as Neko Musume (reprising role)
• Akio Ohtsuka as Nezumi Otoko (new)
• Ryota Hirono
• Keisuke Ueda
• Rurika Miya
• Yūko Asano (played Sunakake Baba in previous play)

A previous stage play ran in Tokyo in July to August 2022.

The franchise also announced on Saturday it will air a new selection of episodes from the first through six seasons starting on April 6 at 9:00 a.m. on Fuji TV. Fuji TV revealed a visual featuring Mizuki and the different styles of Kitaro in the six seasons.

The latest GeGeGe no Kitarō anime — the sixth television anime incarnation — premiered in April 2018 and replaced Dragon Ball Super in the same timeslot. The show ended its run in March 2020 after 97 episodes.

The Kitarō Tanjō: Gegege no Nazo (The Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe) anime film opened in Japan in November 2023, and sold 111,500 tickets for 160,106,620 yen (about US$1.07 million) in its first three days.

Kitarō Tanjō: Gegege no Nazo Shinsei-ban (True Birth Version), the recut version of the film, opened in theaters in Japan on October 4. The film's original screening run had a PG12 rating. The new version was rated R15+.

Mizuki's manga, which began in 1959 under the name Hakaba Kitarō, has spawned seven television series (including one Hakaba Kitarō anime), several animated movies, and two live-action films. The stories center on an inhuman boy who straddles the line between the human and supernatural worlds.

Sources: GeGeGe no Kitarō stage plays' X/Twitter account, Stage Natalie, Comic Natalie