BRM: Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armaggedon!

Synopsis:

Raised as a weapon by a brutal conspirator, a young female assassin discovers that her target has spun the Empire of Japan into crisis and ruin and is none other than her father.
The Shogun, in a rage, has fired her master and hired three super warriors from the West to eliminate this Last Wolf of Japan who defies his legacy.
Torn between loyalty to her mission, her nation and her soul, she must face the unimaginable at the twilight of an imperial epoch.

DEADLY SHE-WOLF ASSASSIN AT ARMAGEDDON! is the latest music/theater and martial arts tour de force from collaborators Fred Ho and Ruth Margraff. A daring and imaginative homage to the 1970s Japanese raging cult manga and movies hit, Lone Wolf and Cub (Kozure Ookami), which has inspired many other adaptations and works in comic books and film over the past decades.
DEADLY SHE-WOLF…explodes with a ferocious stylistic mix of Japanese Noh theater and modern-day anime and manga influences with unique multi-martial arts and sword fighting choreography and a glorious score fusing traditional Japanese music and soul-jazz.

Notes from Fred Ho

From 1972 to 1974, six of the original “Lone Wolf and Cub” chambara (Japanese martial arts/samurai period) films were released and quickly ignited an international cult following. This cinematic output coincided with the first renaissance of Hong Kong kung fu films and U.S. black exploitation cinema, respectively. The “Lone Wolf” film music by composers Hideakira Sakurai (who composed the first five film scores) and Kunihiko Murai (who did the last, sixth film), in my opinion, ranks among the greatest movie-television music of all time, including the espionage film music of Lalo Schriffin (the classic “Mission: Impossible” tv series and “Enter: The Dragon”), Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” score, Ennio Moriccone’s spaghetti western soundtracks and the sword and sandal and sci-fi fantasy scores of Bernard Hermann. The music for the “Lone Wolf” movies innovatively combines Japanese traditional influences with the hippest of contemporary “jazz”. In the film music, there is virtually no melody. Rather, texture and rhythm abound. I’ve tried to retain this approach in my score.

Why chose assassins as “heroes” or central characters? In an era of social upheaval and transition as was the case of twilight era of the Tokugawa period of Edo-Japan (mid-19th century), and the ominous arrival and contact with The West, the traditional values become diluted, distorted, corrupted, perverted and inverted. When political and moral corruption abound, the assassin or anti-hero who rejects all rules, forsakes all loyalty to the established order and embraces the cold-blooded capitalist way of “professional for hire” becomes the apotheosis of revolutionary individualism tearing asunder all feudal obligations and ascriptions. And yet, the Assassin and his son, always referred to as “we” (“We, father and son, have chosen to live in the world of blood shedding/We are not afraid to face any danger, known or unknown/We live at the crossroads of Hell”), disgraced and who in turn discard social position and proprieties, become the greatest threat to imperial decadence and arrogance.

Ruth Margraff’s writing is funded by the Individual Artist Program of the New York State Council on the Arts.