Death Note the Musical

This is a fun one: Death Note the Musical is an adaptation of the hit manga that tells the story of one Light Yagami, a brilliant student who is given a notebook by a capricious magical being. The book has one very specific function: anyone whose name is written in it will die within 40 seconds. The power goes to Light’s head, as he comes to see himself as a god tasked with eliminating evildoers from the planet. But the world’s governments hire a secretive detective – whose real name is unknown – to try and find the person responsible for the inexplicable deaths. It’s not your everyday story, that's for sure, but that goes for a lot of musicals, and you can actually kind of see it working. The original manga was written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata; the musical is written by a Western team of Frank Wildhorn, Jack Murphy and Ivan Menchell. It has, however, had various Asian productions over the last decade, but this new one from director Stephen Whitson is easily its biggest Western outing to date.