The world has only grown more dire since Studio Theatre first staged Astro Boy and the God of Comics, theater maker Natsu Onoda Power’s whimsical, wildly imaginative tribute to Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka and his most recognizable creation, more than a dozen years ago. In an interview published in the $15 comic book-style souvenir program I was moved to buy after a thinly attended matinee performance of the show’s winning new revival at Flying V, Power observes that the evolution in consumer tech—even just since 2012—has brought the human-scale multimedia spectacle closer to what she’d hoped to see when she created its earliest iteration as a grad student more than 20 years ago. Boasting a quick-changing six-person cast doing a series of live, synchronized drawings, “animation” achieved by hand-shuffling a series of still frames in front of a camera throwing a live feed to the rear of the stage, and pretty much every other type of low-fi illusion imaginable, the show is a blur of color and motion. At other, more lavishly budgeted companies in town, throwing the A/V club at a production is often a means of trying to pull focus from a paucity of ideas. With Astro Boy, the form is the content.
But it still looks like a dauntingly difficult thing to pull off, dependent on perfect synchronization between the performers on stage and the ones operating the lights and A/V elements—though in many cases those people are one and the same. (This is a true ensemble production wherein almost everyone juggles multiple roles, so singling out any individual actor for praise would seem contrary to the enterprise.)
Much of Astro Boy’s charm, a dozen years ago and now, comes from the panoply of handmade illusions it uses to give us a space-faring epic on a black box theater budget: Astro Boy’s self-sacrificing flight into the sun to save Earth from a menacing uptick in solar radiation takes the form of a painted cardboard cutout being pulled along a string into an orange light. In more highly choreographed segments, a trio of actors trace invisible-to-the-audience lines on a cellophane-like surface to create the illusion of drawing the character into existence in mere moments.
Flying V’s revival of Natsu Onoda Power’s Astro Boy; courtesy of Flying V
After Tezuka’s beloved creation—a flying, machine gun-toting Pinocchio with an IQ of 300 and an equally outsize capacity for empathy and unconditional love of humankind—sacrifices himself, the show moves backward, becoming a loving but far from hagiographic account of Tezuka’s life and work. He was a teenager when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagaski. He published his first comic book two years later, as a medical student. He completed his medical training but never practiced, devoting his energies instead to creating art—though he kept medical-resident hours, often sleeping at his office, yelling at his assistants, and neglecting his wife and children in favor of his work. He worked even on his deathbed, succumbing to stomach cancer in 1989. By then, the perpetually beret-wearing artist’s work had evolved far beyond the character with whom he’d remain most closely associated, encompassing ambitious, long-form manga investigations of medicine and Buddhism, among other topics. (He also got into some freaky corners, but let anyone who has never procrastinated by sketching mouse erotica cast the first stone.)
One of the most amusing chapters details the cost-saving measures Tezuka and his team employed to produce a weekly 30-minute animated series on a budget equivalent to $6,000 per episode—an impossibly stingy sum even in 1963, when the show debuted. They built a library of sequences of Astro Boy running and flying, which could be recycled endlessly. The series became the first anime to be broadcast outside of Japan, including in the U.S. By the time of the final episode of this iteration of the character, four years and 193 episodes later, the show’s imagery had become as overfamiliar as its ideas. But for a few years during the Space Race, Astro Boy flew close to the sun.
Astro Boy and the God of Comics, written by Natsu Onoda Power and directed by Dylan Arredondo, runs through Nov. 3 at the Silver Spring Black Box. flyingvtheatre.com. $30.