Potentially Illegal Wicked School Production in Japan?

https://twitter.com/utessdrama/status/1583454967243083777?s=46&t=JbPN-Z6VyxlsvOXGbpfKpg
 

Saw this from Twitter earlier. It seems a club from the University of Tokyo is mounting a production of Wicked, to be performed in English. As of now, amateur licensing for Wicked is not available in the U.S. and from mti the school licensing is only available in Australia. There is an official Japanese production with Gekidan Shiki, and maybe they have the rights to the translation. The English language material, though, is another story. I don’t think they have the rights to perform the material in public without proper licensing, which should have not been made available to public in Japan yet. Stephen Schwartz is obviously highly protective of his works, so I wonder if there’s anything he could do as this is happening in Japan.

I studied abroad at Waseda University (also in Tokyo) in 2005.

The school did productions of Little Shop of Horrors, Urinetown, and Avenue Q all on one weekend. Avenue Q was still running on Broadway, and Urinetown was likely new to being licensed.

Legality aside, I had a really fun time. I couldn't see many shows as a college student, and was really happy to see them staged. I remember the Avenue Q cast rolled out a banner with a translation for the phrase "It sucks to be me." The shows were done fully in Japanese, but that phrase was said in English.

This was the early 2000s, so it was much easier to fly under the radar. Japan also has a culture of a grey line around copyright and fan works (for example, fan artists frequently sell art and manga of popular anime, video games, etc).