Arabian Nights

On Sunday, 28th of February I have attended a show in the Longstreet Theatre called The Arabian Nights. A very entertaining show, with many different colorful costumes, nice music expressions, and striking voices of singers impressed me greatly. Atmosphere in the hall room was great, but the room itself was really little, which was unusual for me. In my opinion, audience liked the performance afterwards, I heard other people discussing it with each other, and their overall impression was looking good. The fact, that this performance showed me a completely different culture and people, made me like it a lot as well.

The performance had two acts, an hour each with a fifteen minutes intermission. The plot of the story is the same as a regular "One Thousand and One Nights." The main frame story concerns a Persian king Shahryar and his new bride Scheherazade. While he discovers, that his current wife is unfaithful to him, he executes her, declares that all women are unfaithful, and keeps marrying other virgins and killing them the next morning after marriage. One day, the vizier, a person who is supposed to bring those virgins for him, cannot find any more for him. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as a bride, and her father agrees, unwillingly. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade tells him a tale, but does not end it, so the king is forced to keep her alive to hear the end of the story. The next night, while finishing the old one, she immediately starts a new one, so the king has to postpone her execution once again. And it happens for 1001 nights in a row.

These tales naturally showed its audience the real Persian poor urban life and its elements. The heroes are usually little criminals and thieves. These can be both--males and females, for example, immortal in Arabic fairy tales characters Ali-Baba and Dalilah the Crafty. These fairy tales never show their respect to the kings or any representatives of the governmental and faithful power--on the contrary, they keep laughing at them and being careless about it. That is why Muslims in Russia do not accept this book, and it is a sin to keep it at their houses.

Heroes of these tales are significant by their courage and enterprise and contrast a lot with the other Arabic tales, representing the sensitive life in a typical Arabic harem. Besides the tales about Ali-Baba and Dalilah the Crafty, there was a wonderful story about Aziz and Azizah, and my favorite one-- the Madman's Tale. I like it the most because of an interesting plot, mostly.

Also this performance impressed me greatly because it included all possible genres of stories--love, tragedy, folk, comedy, humorous etc. impressed me greatly. I had fun watching them all because of this type of mixing the stories. The point which I also liked in that performance was that almost every single story had a little piece of love contained in it, which made me stay involved, very interested and entertained all the time. Also, several of them had a lot of magic in it, like djinns, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled together with real people and geography. All these factors together submitted a great performance.

The concert had a couple of scenes, when ladies were showing Arabic belly-dancers and trying to dance like them. I lived in an Arab country for a little bit and