Nada Haddad
Special to The Daily Star

Something very special is going on at UNESCO Palace in Ramlet al-Baida for the next 10 days. The first production spawned from the Baalbek International Festival’s new mahaweb (talents committee) premiered Wednesday night to great acclaim.
The musical play, Ayyam Roubayyat Al-Khayam (The Days of Al-Khayam’s Quartets) is the first attempt by the Baalbek Festival to fulfill its goal of creating and encouraging young artists as well as enriching the artistic scene by furthering Arabic culture.
The talents committee will be responsible for pushing new works and helping production of them be they dance, theater or music.
Ayyam Roubayyat Al-Khayam is a unique theatrical adaptation of a tale inspired by a masterpiece of Persian and international poetry by the renowned poet, scientist, wiseman, and sufi Omar al-Khayam, who lived in Persia in the 13th century.
Khayam’s verse, which is in quatrain form ­ a verse consisting of four alternately rhyming lines ­ was translated into Arabic by the poet and Oum Kalthoum lyricist, Ahmed Roumi (some of them were sung by the Egyptian diva). Four of the 16 quatrains in the play are sung by Lebanese singer Jahida Wehbe in a tribute to Oum Kalthoum.
The musical, which is in Arabic, tackles in song, action, and dance, the philosophic themes that were dear to Khayam’s heart ­ life, death, love, future, possible and impossible, reality and unreality, the world between which we fight.
Some of the verses tell an impossible love story between a princess from the unseen world of the Jinns, and a prince from the mortal world. It is impossible because the princess cannot leave the secretive world she knows, but also because the king of the Jinns is in love with her, and decides to separate her by force from her prince. But “nothing is impossible for a woman in love …”
Omar Khayam, who was a pupil of the Persian physician and Neo-Platonist philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna), has been famous for seven centuries for his math theorems, his bissextile calendar, his treatises and, of course, his poetry.
He acquired international notoriety long after his death when a booklet containing his quatrains was discovered and translated for the first time into English by Edward Fitzgerald.
With fine acting and singing from some of the most renowned Lebanese and Arab actors including Wehbe, Randa Asmar, Gabriel Yammine and Carlos Azar, and young dancers from the Lebanese University, Ayyam Roubayyat Al-Khayam is a brilliant adaptation of a magical world and magical text.
The set design by Joe Farah is brilliantly simple ­ neat lines and no flourishes, with large transparent white drapes hanging from the ceiling to the floor, and a red platform. This simplicity emphasizes well the temporal nature of the play: comings and goings between future, present and past.
The lighting is brilliantly suggestive of the hedonistic celebrations at the mortal prince’s court, given by a troupe of female dancers and singers with flowers in their hair.
There is a wink to Khayam the astronomer, too, when Wehbe, as the oracle, sitting between 12 illuminated white circles tries to guess and forecast what destiny awaits the lovers, and in which direction the wheel of life and wheel of love will turn.
Adding to the magic are Samia Saab’s costumes, highlighting the dancers’ perfect movements and thus revealing the intricate choreography that clearly took months to rehearse. Choreographer Jihad al-Andari has, with oriental dances with gracious arm movements and lascivious waist swaying in the prince’s court, created and directed six beautiful scenes.
Contemporary and futuristic dance exist with white costumes for the Jinns of the unreal world. At the end of the play, a breath-taking tribal dance explodes onto the stage, bringing the audience back in time to the age-old desert. Andari’s dances root this show in the three periods of time: present, future and past.
The music is in turn oriental, instrumental, and ethnic, which again highlights the different worlds battling against each other: the Jinns, the prince’s court, and the desert.
Asmar, who made her name in such plays as Tlet neswan twal staged by Nidal al-Achkar and Jawad al-Asadi’s Al-Khadimatane, plays the character of the princess and is intense in her rendering of the heat of desire, the torments of love, and the will of a woman in love.
Wehbe, who has also performed in plays by Achkar, and by Raymond Gebara, Jalal Khoury, Latifeh Multaka to name but a few, is excellent in her different roles ­ full of intensity in her singing, with intelligence dripping from each word she pronounces.
Actor and producer Yammine is convincing as the King of the Jinns who assumes different identities, and Azar plays the character of the madly-in-love prince with perfect abandon.
With Ayyam Roubayyat Al-Khayam, producer Jabbar Khammat Hassan and composer Ziad Boutros have created a wonderful, passionate and colorful tribute to one of the Arab world’s most brilliant historical figures. We see Khayam, the deep and sensual poet with an existential philosophy, and his Roubayyat ­ the play will only help conserve the legacy of the man.
If the Baalbek Festival committee continues the way they have begun, to produce high quality new performances forwarding local and Arabic culture, they can only be commended for a job well done.

Ayyam Roubayyat Al-Khayam is playing at UNESCO Palace nightly until Nov. 8 at 8.30pm. For tickets call Trading Places on 01/611600