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Matthew Bourne is not a man to shun experimentation. The British dancer-turned-choreographer is known for producing a gender-bending Swan Lake, turning Carmen into a bisexual mechanic and putting La Sylphide into Scottish kilts.
So, it probably wasn't much of a stretch for him to rework Edward Scissorhands as a sort of Frankenstein-meets-West Side Story dance extravaganza - with no dialogue. Bourne calls it a dance musical.
The 1990 Tim Burton movie tells the story of a shy boy with lethal cutting instruments for mitts who can tame the unruliest hedge or head of hair. Tears fall like rain when the cornbread, polyester-clad busybodies of Hope Springs try to banish him from their midst.
But as anyone who has watched the movie knows, much of its pathos hangs on a single magic ingredient: Johnny Depp's doe-eyed handsomeness.
Those dark eyes, glistening in a pancake-white face, suggested depths of incomprehension and pain that shot straight from big-screen close-ups into the tender hearts of millions of blubbering female fans. And when he wasn't breaking hearts with his eyes, Depp was melting them with his soft, butterscotch voice.
Stripped of the Depp factor, Bourne's adaptation, which is about to take up residence for two weeks in Tokyo, prefers to let its feet and music do the talking. Bourne says Edward doesn't speak much in the film either and expresses himself mostly through movement. 'He's like a silent character in a way,' he says.