American playwright Ivan Menchell has been announced as the scriptwriter for Death Note the Musical.

This is hardly shock news. He habitually works with composer Frank Wildhorn and lyricist Jack Murphy, both of whom were on board with the project last month.

The trio have collaborated on the Broadway productions of Bonnie & Clyde and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The former, at least, holds potential for working out how his Death Note script might look.

Bonnie and Clyde were real world criminals/folk heroes/psychopathic robbers (depending upon your point of view), who were the scourge of Texas law enforcement agencies during the Great Depression. The lovers basically went on a murder spree, holding up anything with money that they could stick their guns into, as an alternative to crippling poverty in the American south.

Dark and dramatic enough for Light Yagami? Possibly. Let's listen to a song from the Broadway show to find out:

Not sure how helpful that will be. The music is Frank Wildhorn, but the lyrics are Don Black on that track! I failed on giving us any insight into Jack Murphy OR Ivan Menchell.

Moving swiftly on...

A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, you may be more familiar with Ivan Menchell's television work. He was both writer and producer on episodes of CBS's The Nanny and Fox's Time of your Life.

Ivan Menchell's scriptwriting credentials will also be exhibited in the upcoming Adam Sandler movie Blended. That will hit the silver screens in March 2014.

Do we think that the musical Death Note script is in safe hands?  You may follow Ivan on Twitter at @TheIvanMenchell to keep in with the gossip.

Also announced this week is precisely when and where the premier of Death Note the Musical will take place. In April 2015, it will launch at the Nissay Theater in Tokyo, Japan.

After a two month run, the Death Note stage show will move to South Korea, where it'll be performed at the LG Arts Center, in Seoul, duing July and August of the same year.

Anybody hoping to see it?

Things are really hotting up for the 10th Anniversary celebrations of Death Note. This is what we get for living long enough to see a decade come around! Lots of good stuff to rekindle our obsession with the manga.

The latest official surprise is this:

Your Japanese not up to the job?  No, neither is mine. But fortunately the good folk of Anime News Network have provided the salient details for us.

The poster is advertising officially sanctioned Death Note Real Escape Games, at the 'Secret Base' of SCRAP in Kyoto and a second, undisclosed location in Osaka, to be held between May 30th and July 27th 2014.

Participants will be locked inside Death Note themed rooms, wherein they will pit their collective ingenuity against a series of puzzles and clues. The object of the game is to unlock the door and escape, for which individuals will be looking to the crowd around them for assistance.

But lurking in that crowd will be an actor playing a 'second Kira'. He, or she, is tasked with the job of 'killing' those remaining in their rooms, once the timer has run out. 

Presumably - seeing as this appears to be a very Wammy's House kind of construct and the actor is apparently anonymous (as in unknown, not the hacktivists) - the 'second Kira' will also be thwarting players in their attempts to escape the rooms. If crowd sourcing information is required, then it wouldn't take much to sabotage escape plans.

Tickets go on sale on March 21st for the twin 10th Anniversary Death Note events. They cost between 2,200 yen to 3,300 yen. (I wonder what the difference means - do those in the cheap 'seats' get less time? Or does 'second Kira' target them first?)

One thing worth noting, if you're reading from the USA, is that SCRAP Entertainment Inc also has headquarters in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Maybe if Death Note fans really kick up there, you might get your own Real Escape Games complete with a pen-wielding Kira.

If you do, please report back.

It's been over a week since I first set up this website (largely on a whim), hence I've had more time to think about what I can do with it.

This is what you can expect coming up on a (semi) regular basis:

• Death Note news from around the world. Gossip too, if we can get it. I'll continue monitoring the world wide web for any information about Death Note, real world and canon, then plonking it here for your delight and enjoyment.
  
• Death Note discussions - plot and character chats, based on anything that I've uncovered wonderful and new, so that it's not anything that we've all discussed a billion times on MangaBullet and elsewhere. Like the Mello alternative ending from last week.
  
• Death Note Where Are They Now?  Finding anyone and everyone who ever had anything to do with the franchise, and up-dating the world on their current CV.
  
• Focus on a Fan - periodically (probably once a month or so) I'll hand over a blog entry to one of the old gang from MB (or the wider Death Note fandom). They'll get to tell you where they are, what they're up to, where you can find them and anything else which they think important to share. This is on the basis that so many of us scattered when the old site collapsed, and it's nice to keep in touch.
  
• Product Peer Review! There's so much tat and good stuff in the Death Note merchandising world. I thought that every so often, I could add one in a blog entry, and we could give our expert considered opinions. Have we bought it? Why not? Would we touch it with a bargepole? Is this a want and covet moment? Etc.
  
• Death Note feature - This is where I pick on a character from the manga and give them another 15 minutes of fame. I was thinking that the more obscure the better, though I suppose we'd have more to say about the main 'cast'.
  
• Read-a-along a Death Note managa.  A bit like storytime when we were kids, but more us all getting our own copies, reading and discussing a chapter at a time. Might be too much like hard work. We'll see. If there's any joy at the prospect of this, we might see a little harder.
  
• Watch-a-along a Death Note anime.  See above, but quicker.
  
• Updates on my 11th novel in the It Matters series. About once a month, I'll nip in to tell you how much of it I haven't written. Hopefully you might get the odd surprise month, when I knocked out ten chapters. You know how it goes.

Anything there you're thinking 'yay' or 'bleurrrggghhh' about?  This is me brain-storming over the course of a few days, so nothing is yet set in stone. Besides you know what I'm like. I'll probably be bored this time next week, and moved on to blogging about computer hardware instead.

But for now, my 'occasional' blog has turned into 'something every day' and I'm enjoying myself immensely.  Thanks all!