Revue Starlight (少女☆歌劇 レヴュースタァライト, Shōjo Kageki Revyū Sutāraito; lit. Girls' Musical Revue Starlight) is a Japanese media franchise created in 2017 by Bushiroad, Nelke Planning and Kinema Citrus. It primarily consists of a series of musicals, debuting between 22 and 24 September 2017 at the AiiA 2.5 Theater Tokyo; a 12-episode anime television series directed by Tomohiro Furukawa which aired between July and September 2018; and two animated films, released on 7 August 2020, and 4 June 2021, which abridged and continued the story of the anime. It has received three manga adaptations, all of which began serialization in January 2018. A smartphone game titled Shōjo Kageki Revue Starlight: Re LIVE, developed by Ateam, launched in October 2018. Six years after the game's launch, the game ended service for all servers in September 2024. A visual novel game titled Shōjo☆Kageki Revue Starlight Stage Musical Impression Drama: Distant El Dorado was launched on 8 August 2024 for the Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. The visual novel is a sequel to the franchise's second animated film, Revue Starlight: The Movie. A new anime sequel has been announced.
Premise The Revue Starlight franchise includes stage musicals, a musical animated series, musical films, and a mobile game each telling original, interconnected stories about the training, personal lives, and growth of several groups of female performing arts students, who are distinguished from their peers as "Stage Girls" by their exceptional zeal for stage acting, ambition for stardom, and competitive nature. Over multiple school years, the characters are drawn together by these shared qualities despite their greatly different personalities and talents, while also coming into conflict in their pursuit to surpass each other. The Stage Girls invariably settle their conflicts by performance in an otherworldly underground theatre in the round, where the "brilliance" that embodies their passion for acting empowers them to stage impromptu musical theatre revues without stagehands or audiences. In these revues, the Stage Girls sing seemingly spontaneously composed musical numbers, clash in largely hand-to-hand combat, and may even act out dramas, on an ever-changing set constructed by unmanned stagecraft. Though the Stage Girls are depicted as using real weapons, the battles end harmlessly with the removal of a piece of the opponent's stage costume, and victory is declared by standing at a taped T-mark dubbed "position zero". The franchise portrays the spectacle of these revues both on stage using choreography and stage combat, and in animation. A talking giraffe and eventually, other denizens of the underground theatre, preside over the revues, all seeking to witness the unpredictable scenes that will play out on stage each time. The Stage Girls join some of these revues by enticement and others by their own volition, but always to fight for consequential stakes in their theatrical pursuits. In each revue, the characters perform an original "revue song" in duets and ensembles. The franchise further includes a discography of albums and singles collecting these and other original songs, composed in various show tune styles. The franchise also chronicles the Stage Girls' backstage exploits during school theatre productions. The plots of these plays, most prominently the fictional play Starlight, are often recounted as a story within a story.
Characters As the same characters appear in both staged and animated media, each character is performed live by her voice actress in stage shows and concerts.
Seisho Music Academy The franchise launched in 2017 with a cast made up of nine students from Seisho Music Academy's 99th graduating class, who have since appeared as the main casts of three numbered stage plays, an anime series, two animated films, and several manga. They have also received prominent focus in a mobile game. In addition, they have recorded most of the musical discography of the franchise under the billing of Starlight Kuku Gumi (スタァライト九九組, lit. Starlight 99 Group), and have performed the franchise's music live in three numbered concerts, as well as two orchestral concerts.
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