Trivia / Death Note: The Musical

• Cut Song: "Honor Bound", Soichiro's solo, is cut from the Korean production.
• Colbert Bump: The English demo got an unexpected boost in popularity in 2020, after several people began uploading and discussing the songs on TikTok, leading to a Newbie Boom from both Death Note fans who didn't know about the musical, and musical theatre fans who didn't know about Death Note.
• Dawson Casting: 14 year old Sayu is played by 30 year old Laura Osnes in the English demos, 20 year old Lee Suu Bin in Korea, and 21 year old Rachel Clare Chan in London. Japan narrowly avoids this with Ami Maeshima, who was still a teenager when she was cast.
• Fake Mixed Race: L is portrayed by Asian actors in the Japanese and Korean versions even though Obata (the creator of Death Note) has said that L is a quarter British, a quarter Japanese, a quarter Russian and maybe a quarter French or Italian, however, this can be forgiven due to the massive difficulty and even sheer luck you would need to have to be able to find a person like this, who's the right age and can also sing and act. Fittingly enough, the London production does indeed cast an Asian-British actor in the role.
• Fake Nationality: Inevitably, every production outside of Japan (South Korea, Rio de Janeiro, Russia, and London) has actors of different nationalities playing Japanese characters.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For a while, it was incredibly hard to get (legal) English language versions of the songs, as most of them were only released as demos (which are still accessible via YouTube). The London cast recorded an English album in 2023, which as of January 2024 still hasn't been released.
• No Export for You: English versions of most of the songs are able to be found, but as of July 2022 the musical has only ever had full productions in Japan, South Korea, and Brazil. According to the screenwriter it is coming to America, though it's unknown when. There was however an officially sanctioned Russian concert production in March of 2021. The first English-language concert finally took place in London in August of 2023, with a few of the actors performing songs from it at New York Comic Con.
• Role Reprise: Takeshi Kaga, who portrayed Soichiro in the Japanese films, returned to the role for the original Tokyo production.
• So My Kids Can Watch: Frank Wildhorn hadn't even heard of Death Note when he was offered the job of writing the songs. He agreed to work on the project because he mentioned it to his teenage son, who told him that if he did, it'd be "the coolest thing he'd ever done."

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