单选题   Para. 1 On any given night outside a theater in central Tokyo, hundreds of women can be found waiting in neat phalanxes, dressed in matching T-shirts or sporting identical colored handkerchiefs—the uniform of what may be the most rabidly loyal fans in Japanese entertainment.
    Para. 2 The stars they're hoping to glimpse are women, too, actresses who play both male and female roles in the 102-year-old Takarazuka Revue, an enduringly successful theater company that is bringing its gender-twisting take on the Broadway musical to the Lincoln Center Festival in New York from July 20 to 24.
    Para. 3 ①In Takarazuka's 'Chicago,' women play the sultry Velma and Roxie as well as the swaggering Billy Flynn and the hapless-schmoe Amos. ②The dialogue is in Japanese, but at a recent dress rehearsal here, the attitude and staging were all-American, loyal to Bob Fosse's vaudeville-inspired production, which has been running on Broadway for two decades.
    Para. 4 In Japan, Takarazuka is a phenomenon that rarely tours outside the country.
    Para. 5 ①Founded in 1914 by a railway company that hoped to lure travelers to a struggling hot spring resort outside Osaka, the group began with a handful of teenage singers and dancers and staged its first performances in a converted swimming pool. ②A century later, Takarazuka operates five sub-troupes and puts on 900 shows a year, in company-owned theaters in Tokyo and its original western Japanese base. ③Most of the shows sell out.
    Para. 6 ①Cross-dressing, single-gender theater groups have a long history in Japan. ②This year's Lincoln Center Festival also features the Kanze Noh Theater, whose stately, stylized dramas are older than Shakespeare and are performed exclusively by men. ③Kabuki—Noh's somewhat newer, livelier cousin—was pioneered by all-female troupes, until a 17th-century public-morals crackdown put them out of business. ④Today, Kabuki, too, is all-male.
    Para. 7 ①On the surface, Takarazuka looks like a rebellion against such classical Japanese art forms. ②Its touchstones are modern and Western—Parisian cabaret, Radio City-style variety shows and, since the 1960s, Broadway. ③The railway executive who founded the company is said to have banned Japanese musical instruments from its backing orchestra, fearful of a lingering public association between geisha and other traditional female performers and prostitution.
    Para. 8 ①Despite its Western trappings, Takarazuka draws on 'ideas of purity that are very primitively Japanese,' Akio Mild, a veteran Takarazuka director, said. ②They show up in its productions and in the way the company—whose official motto is 'modesty, fairness, grace'—regulates its performers' private lives.
    Para. 9 ①'Chicago' is a rare Takarazuka show without a dreamy male hero. ②An all-female heater company might be counted on to lay bare men's flaws and follies onstage, but at Takarazuka the approach is gentler. ③Its shows depict men not as they are, Mild said, but as they ought to be.
    Para. 10 ①'It's an idealized male image, seen through women's eyes: The heroes are more romantic, more divine,' he said. ②'They don't tend to lie or cheat. It's what the audience would like from men but doesn't usually get in reality.'