Manga’s wunderkind gets a musical makeover.
The Barbican’s love affair with Japanese contemporary culture shows no sign of cooling. Having given us My Neighbour Totoro, now in its final weeks in the West End, and before it, Spirited Away, the venue is stepping away from the family-friendly sheen of Studio Ghibli and into a rather darker corner of the manga world.
At the end of this month comes the world premiere of Death Note: The Musical, the first English-language staging of a show that has become a fixture in Japan. The source material needs little introduction. Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s manga has sold more than 30 million copies, spawned a 37-episode anime, since picked up by Netflix, and has been adapted for both Japanese and Hollywood cinema. A Japanese-language musical followed in 2015 and has been playing to devoted audiences ever since.
Now it arrives at the Barbican at the end of this month with the same score by Frank Wildhorn, fresh English lyrics by Jack Murphy and a book by Ivan Menchell. The premise remains as gleefully macabre as ever: a brilliant high-school student stumbles upon a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in its pages, and sets about remaking the world in his own image. It is a story that has hooked millions, and on commercial grounds alone, it looks a safe bet. Whether it lands as a critical success is a rather different question.
Three numbers are previewed at the launch event, and they prove engaging. Wildhorn’s rock-anchored score sits somewhere in the neighbourhood of Next to Normal or Spring Awakening, which is no bad thing, though it feels decidedly out of kilter with the neon-Tokyo styling of the launch party at 77 London. The bigger question is one of scale: whether a musical of a little over two hours can do narrative justice to a 108-chapter, 12-volume saga.
We will know soon enough. But one thing is already beyond doubt: the appetite is there. Tickets are shifting fast, the fans are ready, and you sense that Death Note devotees will be queuing around the block for a first look at this reinterpretation. On that score alone, the Barbican has a hit on its hands.
Death Note: The Musical runs at the Barbican from 30 July to 12 September 2026
