I agree that's particularly effective imagery for the movie (with the wind chime/bell), since it's a largely visual medium, whereas I think the visual effect (plus, practicality
) would be lost in the more expressive physical form of the musical. That they preserved the sound for the scene transitions regarding Eiko was a decent homage I guess -- though interestingly enough, for the final flashback at the last act, they DIDN'T use the bell to transition, whereas in all other flashbacks with Shibukawa and Eiko, it is always signaled by that bell sound. It is as you say, the destruction of the bell in the movie marks her transformation into a Stacy, and similarly in the musical, Shibukawa's memory is not punctuated with the sound of the bell for that final scene where Eiko is dead and about to be reanimated. Subtle devices that people who have either watched the movie or read the book would notice, and maybe not even then.
Ok so we're on to doing this?
Do you have an IM contact I can reach you at? I can slowly start translating the dialog from the start、though I won't be able to do it very quickly since I'm in the process of moving house (again, lol) but I should still be able to do it in bits.
Actually I'm still not 100% sure that's what the male chorus is saying. It could just as well be Death, Hell and Live. The audio is a bit fuzzy on the rip I got, I might go get the ISO instead and hope for clearer audio quality. Haha.
Edit: Except there is no ISO. Wut. >_>
Edit 2: Don't feel like doubleposting. Anyway I'm reading the book on the train again (I can't read more than a few.pages at a time, I don't think I can take the emotional overload), and I think the musical actually did q better job telling the story because of the way it was structured. In the book so far, Shibukawa and Eiko's story is told in linear, so we didn't get the delayed impact the way we did in the musical of Eiko's eventual, unavoidable fate. And I'm still only in the first part of the book and am wondering what else they cut or changed because THAT POOR HAMSTER. Yeah. Lol. Maybe I should translate the novel too >_> haha