Theater has been one of my biggest passions for a long time now. I started performing in fundraising cabarets my dad would host for our local theater when I was ten, and when I finally started acting for real in high school, there was no going back. I have a deep and abiding love for the stage that surpasses pretty much every other hobby I indulge in, even writing about anime. I love acting, I love directing, I love playwriting, I love the process of watching a production pull together, I love watching a performance grow from the first tentative rehearsals to opening night, I love the struggle, I love the success, I love the chaos and nerves and catharsis, I. Love. Theater. And I’ve been so bummed for the longest time because as much as anime has to offer, I could never find an anime that was really able to explore that feeling. Japan clearly has a very different theater culture than the US; there are so few plays depicted in anime, and those few are rarely more than spectacle performances, broad depictions of broad stories that don’t really intend to dig into the meat of what makes this art so rewarding to explore. Sure, Bloom Into You has a pretty rewarding theater subplot, and Rakugo Shinju captures a lot of what makes performing so fascinating to me, but those are clear outliers. Ever since I started watching anime, I’ve been dying to find that one show that truly captures what it means to love theater, in all its impossibly high highs and unbearably low lows and everything in between.

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between, the wait is finally over, and it was 100% worth it.

Revue Starlight is the celebration of theater that I’ve been longing to get from anime ever since I discovered this medium. It’s a soaring, audacious testament to an art form that’s been near and dear to my heart for over a decade now, a riveting exploration of what drives people to reach for the stage and how the pursuit of the spotlight changes us. This show gets theater more fundamentally than I think I’ve ever seen. It understands the ambition that drives actors to compete for the spotlight, and the ways that ambition can both inspire and destroy us. It understands the importance of performance as a transient art, something that must constantly evolve and re-invent itself in the moment of its inception. It understands the fear of feeling like you don’t measure up, the despair of falling short to the standards you set for yourself, the thrill of building a story with your own hands, the numbness of feeling your passion start to sap away from too many false starts. It understands what makes creating for the stage such an exhilarating, terrifying place, the reason so many egos are drawn to speak their piece under the blinding lights yet struggle and break before the pressures it brings with it. There is so much that can be said about theater and those that pursue it, and Revue Starlight captures every single contradictory, chaotic aspect of it.

The story centers around the girls of Seisho Music Academy, a private all-girl's school dedicated to training its students in the art of the stage. Their ambitions drive them all to seek the spotlight's glare, to prove their merit and become the brightest shining star of them all. But things take a turn for the weird when Karen Aijo, the good-natured spunky protagonist, discovers an unusual elevator hidden in the school walls and rides it down to an underground stage where her classmates battle each other in operatic duets under the watchful eye of a talking giraffe.

No, I don't get why there's a giraffe either, but it's awesome.

See, for those of you non-theater geeks out there, the high school theater scene- especially for musical theater- is one of the most cutthroat organizations you could be a part of outside the mafia. It takes a certain degree of ego to be an actor, a desire to show yourself off to an adoring audience and make them cheer as you command their attention. And when all those egos find themselves in conflict for a limited series of roles, ranging from leads to side characters to little more than glorified chorus members, the competition quickly becomes fierce, ruthless, and unforgiving. Revue Starlight’s genius central hook is taking that naturally competitive atmosphere and blowing it up into a full-on war for theatrical supremacy. The performance IS the battle, both literally and figuratively, and the egos that drive all these girls to want to be the Top Star mean that all their fellow classmates are now enemies to be overcome. Either you sing your heart out and take the center stage, or the curtain falls on you and shuts you off in darkness, forever doomed to lick the soles of the one true champion. There's a lot of commentary here on the Takarazaka Revue, a notoriously cutthroat Japanese theater company which similarly prizes the elevation of the leading role at the expense of everyone else, but the ideas here are universal enough to apply to anyone who's ever run the theater gauntlet. The desire to be The One, to stand in the spotlight and draw the audience's attention all on your own, is something that every theater kid feels deep within their souls, whether they want to or not.

But that's where Karen comes in. Because she’s already learned the most important acting lesson ever, one that I took far too long to internalize: the stage is made to be shared. Unless you’re in a very specific one-man show, you never perform alone; you rely on your scene partners, the rest of the cast, the entire stage crew, and they all rely on you in turn. The show only goes on with everyone working together, and Karen, unlike the rest of the Stage Girls, is determined to be a star not just on her own, but by the side of someone she cares deeply for. That person in question is Hikari Kagura, Karen's childhood friend who's been off in England for years but has just transferred back to Seisho Academy to take part in the Underground Revue. Hikari is desperate to win for Karen's sake, seemingly knowing more about the potential dangers of the Revue than she lets on. But Karen wants to win for BOTH their sakes. They made a promise long ago that they would reach stardom together, and nothing's gonna stand in the way of that promise. After all, aren't the best shows the ones where everyone is doing their best to make the entire stage shine that much brighter?

What truly lingers in my mind now that the curtain has finally dropped is how perfectly this show gets what makes theater not just fascinating, but meaningful. It understands how this art can truly shape the lives of those that pursue it; I see so many of my theater experiences reflected in these characters it’s terrifying. In Mahiru and Futaba, I see my admiration of my peers for all they’re able to accomplish and my desire to do them justice. In Junna and Kaoruko, I see my frustration at feeling outmatched by them no matter where I turn, striving to channel that burning envy into becoming a better actor and a better person. In Maya and Claudine, I see my desire to be more than just a solitary star, to balance my own ambition with the people I care for. In Nana, I see my desire to linger in my most rewarding moments forever, knowing that at some point I have to move on and keep evolving no matter how terrifying it is. In Hikari, I see my terror at losing faith in things I once believed so fully in, striving to find meaning when it seems to be slipping away. And in Karen, I see that spark alight again, that simple, excitable passion that drove me to the stage in the first place, still burning brightly no matter how many times it’s snuffed out. I see my fears, my hopes, my desires, my pains, my triumphs, my failures, writ large against this explosive backdrop of symbolism-drenched duels and literalized metaphors. Revue Starlight isn’t just a show about theater; it’s a show about what makes theater so goddamn important, and why it matters so goddamn much.

And it’s in drawing meaning from those truths that this show doesn’t just excite and delight, but becomes something truly transcendent. By digging into the heart of this incredible art, Revue Starlight weaves a narrative of ambition and despair, change and evolution, love and redemption, and above all else, hope. It’s a story that rushes unflinchingly into the thicket of despair, exploring the inevitable transience of life and the terror that makes us brace against it with clear eyes and a burning soul. It lets us feel every last ounce of the weight of the world as it bears down on us, the terrifying promises of the future awaiting us in the darkness and the fear that it’s already too late to change it. It presents life as the ultimate performance, one where the script is uncertain and the roles are ever-changing, where the stage lights are glaring and every performance rages on with no safety nets and no way to go back. It can be so easy to give in to the pressures of life, to rage against the rolling tides of change and conflict until they drag you under to drown. But Revue Starlight knows that no matter what, the show must go on, because this is the only “now” you’ll ever have, and you deserve to make every moment shine. It’s a stunning portrait of the power of choosing your own destiny, of rejecting the scripts of the past and writing your story anew, of strutting your hour upon the stage alongside the people who make it worth standing there and forging fate with your own hands. And whether you’ve spent countless hours sweating in front of an audience or have never so much sung at karaoke night, the power of that message is sure to make your future feel that much brighter.

Because this show- this incredible, awe-inspiring show- is a soaring triumph of everything that kind of brazen determination is capable of. It’s a riveting, exhilarating, exciting, giddy, spellbinding roller coaster ride, an endlessly entertaining action spectacle and an endlessly profound character drama that achieves every last spark of its own ambition. I marvel at its riveting direction, how flawlessly every scene flows into the next, how perfectly chosen every camera frame is, how spellbinding the action scenes are as they trumpet the show’s themes by way of an explosive musical theater bravura showcase. And I’m truly left speechless at the depths of its character writing, how fully realized and human its expansive cast feels, how quickly and deeply you come to understand and empathize with the stage girls who sweat it out for the honor of being chosen as top star. Every last one of them has more texture, nuance, growth, and personality packed into these twelve episodes than some full protagonists get in their entire run. I could spend ages hanging out with them and never run out of things to discover, or delight in, or marvel over. And the fact that they’re all so astronomically gay for each other is just the icing on the cake. This show really is Symphogear’s nerdier cousin, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Revue Starlight is a goddamn triumph. It sets itself impossibly high goals and achieves them with spectacular fireworks, seizing its own well-deserved spotlight as it weaves together countless threads into a single, astounding testament. I honestly have no major complaints to make; the only real nitpick I have is that a couple action scenes aren’t paced quite as well as they could be, and compared to everything else this show has to offer, that barely even registers. When all is said and done, Revue Starlight is a full-on masterpiece, a soaring tribute to the power and pressure of theater and a truly majestic rallying cry for the importance of forging the future with your own hands. Were it not for A Place Further Than the Universe, this would easily be the best anime of 2018, and it deserves so much more attention than it currently has. So if you’ve read this revue and haven’t yet watched Revue Starlight, now’s the time to fix that. Watch this goddamn show. Tell all your friends to watch it. Let’s give this incredible artistic achievement the attention it’s rightfully earned. I promise you, you won’t regret it.