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Story theater
The Blue Demon resurrects Scheherazade
BY CAROLYN CLAY

The Blue Demon
Written and directed by Darko Tresnjak. Music by Michael Friedman. Set by David P. Gordon. Costumes by Linda Cho. Lighting by Rui Rita. Sound by Kurt Kellenberger. With Roxanna Hope, Darius de Haas, Tom Titone, Matt Ramsey, Kirk McDonald, Gregory Derelian, Paul Cortez, Brian Sgambati, Anna Belknap, Tom Flynn, Dara Fisher, and musicians Gabriel Boyers, Gunnard Dobozé, Kareem Roustom, and Mike Wiese. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through February 2.


It took Scheherazade 1001 Arabian nights to soothe her sultan with storytelling. The Blue Demon does it in 90 minutes, in writer/director Darko Tresnjak’s fanciful amalgam of four fairy tales, one ethnic joke, and a plea for world understanding. By its end, not only is the sultan giving out presents instead of chopping off heads, but the storytellers, who have exercised their imaginations to save their skins, have jumped formidable cultural hurdles to become friends. At its heart, the theater piece, by turns romantic and bawdy, Oriental and vaudevillean, is a paean to the ability of creativity to triumph over brutality. But it adds to the sound of the human voice trappings ranging from masks and puppets to the human navel and a buff executioner whose scimitar is larger than his little leather hot pants. It may not be unifiedly magical, in the manner of the American Repertory Theater’s The King Stag, but it’s colorful and clever and casts a spell.

Tresnjak, who is a director of theater and opera as well as a lapsed dancer and puppeteer, first conjured The Blue Demon as a doubtless less lavish outdoor-theater offering for the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1998. The reason it shares a title with one of the lesser-known fiabe, or fairy-tale plays, of 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi is that Tresnjak had intended to mount Gozzi’s fable but decided he didn’t like it. So he stuck to the announced title but made up his own show — though not out of whole cloth.

Tresnjak’s conception begins with the Arabian Nights, from which he borrows not only Scheherazade but also the premise of " The Humpback’s Tale, " in which a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim, according to the program, " confront a murderous conflict and find a surprising resolution. " Here, in the tale-weaving Scheherazade’s framing story, each of three men — a Jewish tailor, a Christian scrivener, and a Muslim jeweler — thinks he has killed the hunchback who was the sultan’s jester and teller of the tales that soothed his " blue demon, " namely insomnia. In other words, if the sultan had Sominex and cable, there would be no play.

But this being ancient Da-mascus (by way of the Borscht Belt), he doesn’t! What happens is that the sultan vows to execute all three possible murderers but is persuaded by Scheherazade to let each tell a story, then pick one to replace his personal blabber and decapitate the other two. It’s a plan, not to mention a frame. So we get the Tailor’s story, which is rooted in Jewish folklore of the supernatural; the Scrivener’s contribution, a Dalmatian folk tale the Yugoslav-born Tres-njak grew up on; and the Jeweler’s gem, a burlesque take on a story (also from the Arabian Nights) about a village besieged by a dragon that demands a daily snack of certified virgin.

At the Huntington, the nesting aspect is reflected in David P. Gordon’s sumptuous set of frames within frames, which retreat toward the storybook skyline of an ancient Eastern city. The gilded frames are etched with characters in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic, drawing us in to the separate but connected worlds of the storytellers. Of course, the separateness is reflected in the tones of the stories. The Tailor’s tale, about a young wife seduced by a lecherous wizard via the sartorial equivalent of Spanish Fly, and the Jeweler’s, about " one sexy beggar " transformed by love into a dragon slayer, are more comical. The Scrivener’s tale, enhanced by serial puppets that allow a princess to grow as a result of her prince’s love, is more fragile and romantic (though it too garnered laughs at Tuesday’s preview performance).

All the tales are enacted by a supple actor/dancer/singer cast (though the choreography, which melds break and belly dance, is sometimes more contemporaneously bawdy than need be). Michael Friedman’s musical embellishment, performed by four on-stage musicians, mixes a bit of snake charmer, some klezmer, and bump-its à la " The Stripper " with snippets of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The production, richly costumed, is lovely to look at it, calling to mind illustrations of the Arabian Nights, particularly Kay Nielsen’s.

The Blue Demon is fun; it’s clever and sensuous, and its heart is in the right world-healing place. But in the end, it seems cobbled together, a whimsical fantasia invented in a hurry (as it was for its initial incarnation in Williamstown). The ART has ridden The King Stag to the bank; The Blue Demon is a flashy but less enduring mount.

Issue Date: January 9 - 16, 2003
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