This might be the strangest and most beautiful Elvis story you’ll read all year.
This past weekend, in a theater in Tokyo, audiences watched the ghost of Elvis Presley return to Graceland. Not on a movie screen. On a stage, told through a 600-year-old form of Japanese theater called noh.
The play is called “Blue Moon Over Memphis.” It was written by an American, Deborah Brevoort, with music by Richard Emmert, and it was performed in English on Oct 10 and Oct 11 as part of a Tokyo arts festival.
Here’s the story it tells.
A lonely woman named Judy, an Elvis fan from Cleveland, drives all the way to Graceland on the anniversary of his passing. A mysterious man lets her slip into the Meditation Garden after hours. And there, under a blue moon, the ghost of Elvis appears to her, young again.
The whole thing mixes the old sounds of noh, the bamboo flute and the drums and a chanting chorus, with blues, gospel and Elvis songs. The actors wear denim. And the mask the company made for Elvis’s ghost, a brand-new noh mask carved to look like his face, is honestly something you have to see to believe.
So what does the ghost say to her?
He tells Judy she isn’t dreaming. He tells her that his own life was the dream, one he only woke from when he passed. And he says a thing that stays with you, that those who are gone get lonely too.
Then he performs what the play calls a “Dance of Loneliness,” and he vanishes into the morning mist. Judy drove all that way with one question burning in her. She never gets to ask it.
There’s no video of the Tokyo performance to share. But the play takes its name from one of the very first songs Elvis ever recorded, back in 1954, when he was a teenager at Sun Studio in Memphis. Here it is.
The 1954 recording that gave the play its name
And if you want to feel what a “Dance of Loneliness” might sound like, listen to Elvis sing about being lonely himself. This is one of the most aching things he ever put on tape.
Elvis singing about being lonely
Sit with those two songs and picture the scene again. A quiet garden, a blue moon overhead, and a young Elvis in a carved wooden mask, telling a stranger that the lonely don’t stop being lonely when they’re gone.
It’s an odd, lovely tribute from the other side of the world. And it says something that almost 50 years on, in a theater in Japan, people still line up to spend one more night with him. Would you have gone?