The Wake

Who, having seen Tim Burton’s film, Edward Scissorhands, can honestly say they remained untouched? Now, the bittersweet, haunting beauty of the film has swirled its way onto the stage in a sellout UK tour and a 23-week visit to America. Directed by Matthew Bourne, Edward Scissorhands will be performed at the Ordway Theater in Minneapolis April 10-15, with tickets ranging between $38 and $60 dollars. A steep price for many Wake readers, this occasion may be worth whipping out the big bucks.

Burton and Edward Scissorhand’s writer, Caroline Thompson passed Edward to Bourne confident that the Tony winning director and his brilliant team could successfully transfer the story to the medium of dance while preserving its haunting, delicate simplicity.

“Matthew [Bourne] is Edward’s perfect conduit,” Thompson says in a press release, “His is a brilliant wit. He thrives on whimsy — one gets to laugh while watching a Matthew ballet. And not just a little, but to laugh a lot (imagine: laughing at the ballet)! We are always with the dancers, alert to their feelings, aware of what’s happening in the tale. Matthew loves narrative. Story drives his dances. At the same time, he can suddenly capture the deepest emotion with the tiniest gesture. He gets giddy messing with rhythm. He has fun. He also knows how to wound. And when.”

Bourne exalts the story as a dreamy fit for the stage. “[Edward Scissorhands] is a hugely original gothic fairy story that is simple and universal enough to be told through music and movement alone,” Bourne says. Bourne describes the movie’s original score by Danny Elfman as the “backbone” for Terry Davies’ music arrangements. Being silent throughout the film, Johnny Depp expressed Edward’s character through movement, which is something that, obviously, lends itself well to dance. In Bourne’s words, “The characters and the visual landscape are … a gift for both myself and our designer Lez Brotherston.”

The result is a deeply moving conglomerate of emotion, humor and wit, wrapped in dynamic music, set and costume design. More modern dance than ballet, critics have applauded the grandiosity of Bourne’s choreography. Contrasting a heavily ornamented graveyard scene from the bright pastel suburban houses and big-haired ladies in fruity dresses, set and costume design has also been applauded. In addition to an all-around quality production, Bourne has packed in several surprises to keep the audience on the edge of their seat.

If there has ever been a production truly for children and adults alike – this is it. The story of Edward Scissorhands uses a simple fairy tale to dig deeply into its audience, exposing loose, sensitive clumps of nerves. “The story occupied realms Tim and I both hold dear. It spun cunningly on the Frankenstein story. It examined the shiny surfaces of suburbia and the ugly underneath. It conjured childhood, the nostalgia and the resentments,” describes Thomson. Although the staged presentation of the story has been criticized at times for drifting too far from the bittersweet into the comedic, critics agree that at its culmination the production is beautiful both inside and out.