Burning Bluebeard

Broadcast by The Ruffians and Porchlight Music Theatre.

Or: Flowers from her Hands

Moonlight. Soft, poetic, chill, extraordinary. A light that awakens a sense of hush of wonder, a flicker back to our youngest self when all the world was a new delight. A light kindled for us by the shade of Robert Murray (actor and playwright Jay Torrence), once stage manager of the Iroquois Theater, for the production of Mr. Bluebeard, a Christmas pantomime, where moonlight swallowed six hundred people in living flames.

The Iroquois Fire is a blazing footnote in Chicago history, and Burning Bluebeard, now a glitzy and breathtaking holiday tradition, might seem a delicate specimen, resining planting anywhere else. But the archival footage of last years production (for sliding ticket prices, the generous to the acceptable) is a splendor that thrives outside the soul of the windy city.

In the ruin of the old theater, five clowns, each a life touched by the fire, are caught in a precarious predicament. They are storytellers; even gone they feel the need to finish Mr. Bluebeard (overstuffed, racist pantomime that it was) and infuse the audience with the delight that should have been felt by the matinee performance of December 30th 1903. But by running the story again, getting to the famous moonlit act two, they run the risk of reigniting the story they cannot escape, of imperiling the audience that sits, right now, in their space.

(I can only fathom what a feeling that must have been, to be there . The plummeting weight in the stomach, a mental race to memorize the exits. Even in a brilliant bit when the clowns usher on a kidnapped audience member a signing a contract stating that we, the patrons, recognize we may be burned to a crisp. We know it’s all a play, something to whet the appetite. But still…)

Fortunately they have protection this time around, a Faerie Queen (Crosby Sandoval), mute and slightly less then glamorous, but bestowed with amazing grace and hilarious expression, and a heart of infinite compassion. It is to her that the cast pin their hopes. They want to tell their story’s nd they want to tell it beautifully, but none of them (or nearly none) wants to pay the price again. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.” prays Eddie Foy (Ryan Walters), with tears in his eyes. But all may yet be well. After all, as Murray reminds us, this is a pantomime, and a pantomime will always have an evil that threatens everything and a faerie queen to make all right again.

Torrence has created a glorious script, a masterwork of storytelling that paints a picture of the Iroquois, the times, and eventually the flame brushstroke by brushstroke, flame by flame. The ornate images of this language hung of plain remembrances, and tearful hopes. He himself is a wonderful loadstone in the cast of Zanies, brining Murray to an unshakeable stance, even as his mind flies in loops of fancy. Pamela Chermansky (as The Fancy Clown) is his opposite, swanning with grand gesture and always quick with a macabre joke, but keeping a mimes light spirt and ability to electrify herself, finding the diamonds in the ruff of the original performance.

Burning Bluebeard is also that rare piece which allows the designers to shine just a powerfully as the performers. The stage, blooming from ghostly to lavish and falling into ruin is Jeffery D Kmiec’s doing, who allows hidden aspects for the actors to rush into the audiences or scramble to great heights, while sound designer Mike Tutai and lighting designer Maggie Fullilove-Nugent (Aven Tavhishel nominee) bring back the ghost of the fire, its unearthly roar and hellish illumination. The former, knits together haunting melodies of popular song (Smells Like Teen Spirt as a Christmas dirge, or a gorgeously funny ballet to Imagine matched with Winehouse’s Rehab (Shouldn’t work. Most definitely does.) while the latter painting breathtaking canvases on the air (most spectacularly in the opening of the locked stage door under the hammers of Murray’s efforts).

Burning Bluebeard would not be a miracle of theater work if all its parts weren’t there to support each other, to run electricity from word to design to action. It’s jokes tremble just on the line of outrageous, its heart is sweet, its tale is true, and it risks all. Like a moment where an interpretive dance of being on fire falters and collapses with the participant crawling with all her might out of the smoke, desperate to move one more inch, it caches us tight, ever unexpected, taking the immensity of the tragedy and compressing it down to the specific, to us in the chairs. We are captured with the magic of the theater, but worried that the clowns prophesy might come true: that the moonlight might break into holocaust again.

One particularly fine example (and the seed of Torrences need to write the play) is Nellie Reed (Leah Urzendowski). We’ve seen Urzendowski parkour across the set and be filled to bursting with excitement and/or terror. But she shares her exuberance and defiance of gravity with Reed, an aerialist serving on Mister Bluebeard, just one of the many (too many) stunts the producers had arranged. Her improvement was to fill her arms with red carnations and when she leapt from the flies in a swing that kept her over the audience and shower the children in the balcony with scarlet petals. Which is how she came to be clamped into a harness, alone, arms full of flowers, far from any help as she saw the fire eat through the lavish backdrop scenes suspended around her head.

More than the horror of death by burning is the disappointment that they can no longer tell a story (or any other story, or this story in any other way). Not only their lives are snuffed out but the spark that gave their lives illumination and warmth. As we careen together back towards the fatal hour, the fatal moonlight we can but home that Torrence and his company of wonders will find a way to rescue, not only us, but the memory of the Iroquois. “I hoped that the ending of our play would make you happy.” Murray says, in timid despair.

And thanks to his creator, and a little faerie magic, we get to see it, and, by heaven, we are.