Mother always said, "Don't play with your food!" If she'd known it could be as entertaining as "Cookin'," she probably would have made an exception.
Having toured more than two dozen countries since its creation in Seoul, Korea in 1997, "Cookin'" is a combination plate of slapstick, percussion, martial arts, dance and loads of fun.
The premise: Four chefs are under the gun to complete a feast for Ms. Lee and Mr. Kim's wedding banquet. Led by Master Chef (Gon Ho Kim), Hot Sauce (Eun Ji Kim), Sexy Food Dude (Byung Joon Park) and Nephew (Sung Joong Byun), the chefs manage to create a wedding cake, bulgoki (Korean BBQ), dumplings and a duck dish in about an hour.
Wet behind the ears, Nephew, whose uncle The Manager (Dae Hee Kwon) has placed him the kitchen, doesn't know how to cook and becomes a menacing troublemaker for the others.
As the only female, Hot Sauce holds her own among the guys with her bare midriff in clear view. while Sexy Food Dude is, well, really sexy.
With wooden spoons, ladles and drumsticks in hand, the four start things off by beating water bottles and other containers lying around the kitchen in a Korean percussion style known as Samulnori.
This beat resonates throughout each show as performers slice and dice through countless carrots, cucumbers, onions, heads of cabbage and other defenseless veggies.
"We brought, like, 200 knives and we started the tour January 7," said Yong Seok Choi, the company manager on Korea's side and translator for the performers.
Though some food might leap off stage occasionally, audience members in the first few rows have nothing to worry about, said Chuck Spurling, senior director of communications and audience development at Centennial Hall.
"They've done theaters where they actually put plastic on the first few rows," he said.
With eight teams currently on tour, including two performing off-Broadway in New York, all performers are from Korea and obviously get homesick when not performing back home.
"I'm happy, but we miss Korean food. Very much," said Byun, aka Nephew.
By the end of their run, this particular team will have hit 43 cities in 20 states, Choi said. After their final gig in Mexico City, the team will head back to Korea to do it all again for another month.
Though all the performers have acting backgrounds, none were required to have cooking backgrounds when they auditioned, said Sunny Oh, executive producer of "Cookin'."
"They don't really cook actual meals on the stage," he said. "We had to try using musicians who had the musical background and tried to teach them how to act, but it was very difficult to do. We found out it was much easier to teach music to actors, so now we only cast actors."
Inspired by sounds around his home, Seung Whan Song - a well-known actor in Korea - developed "Cookin'." Though the show takes place in the modern kitchen of a restaurant in Korea, Song incorporated traditional Korean symbols, the most noticeable being the changsung, or "spirit post," with which the chefs frequently interact with to ask for its blessing on their work.
Primarily based on a traditional Korean style of percussion called "Nong-ak," the music also fuses new and old sounds to create a style called Salmunori.
"It's been with Korea for more than thousands of years," said Sunny Oh, speaking of Nong-ak. "It was created by farmers in the harvest season. When there was much work, they used to play these songs, play these rhythms to kind of promote harmony among the farmers."
Literally meaning, "playing with four instruments," Salmunori was developed about 25 years ago when a group of Korean musicians decided to delve deeply into the musical rhythms of Nong-ak, Oh said.
"Before, Nong-ak was a part of life. It wasn't really considered such a music form," Oh said. "This group of musicians really wanted to see the musical factor of this percussion and they created Samulnori. It became really popular in Korea, and, not only in Korea, but it kind of became popular all around the world.
"And 'Cookin''shows that playing that Samulnori rhythm utilizing kitchen utensils was a very Korean tradition to choose from."
"Cookin'" opened at Centennial Hall Tuesday and will run until Sunday.