Those of you who saw the movie will find the following a somewhat different take on the material. I nevertheless intended to call the show Wishmaster: The Musical but Artisan, the production company who owned the film rights, denied me the right to do so.

Their reason, according to one of their legal people, was that they feared the musical would "damage the franchise"—to which I replied "Damage the franchise? Have you seen your fucking sequels?" Needless to say, I have yet to be invited to work with them again.

—Peter Atkins Los Angeles, November, 2006

Zelda Abernathy (1875-1909): At one time the toast of the Great White Way for her charming performances in American productions of Gilbert & Sullivan, she fell from grace after an unfortunate love affair with a minor Symbolist poet introduced her to the joys of opium. She spent the last decade of her career touring increasingly down-market Vaudeville houses, finally taking her own life in the wings of "Baxter's Varieties", a Burlesque in Cincinnati. Sadly, a telegram was delivered hours after her death offering her a major role in a Broadway revival of Lady Windermere's Fan.

Yvonne Bulstrode (1850-1921): For three years in the mid 1860s, she was the decorative half of "Valozzi and Yvonne", an all-purpose music, magic, and comedy act that won little acclaim. Wooed and won by a mid-west Railroad Baron, she left the stage at 17 to become wife, mother of nine, and doyen of Chicago society. In 1917, a widow for more than a decade, she took part in a charity revue—in which she was spotted by D W Griffith, who enticed her to Hollywood. She specialised for four years in "sweet old lady" roles despite rumours of a spectacularly sexually-adventurous private life.

Xavier Carducci (1869-1902): Throughout the 1890s, Carducci was the most celebrated of the music hall Escape Artists. His fame has been completely eclipsed by that of his younger successor Harry Houdini (said to have been inspired in his choice of career by seeing Carducci perform in 1893) but matters may have been different if Carducci had not died in a tragic on-stage accident at the young age of 33. Carducci also had a pleasant baritone voice and apparently performed, in black-face, as his own opening act on more than one occasion without the audience knowing it.

Walter Donnelly (1862-1910): Immensely popular with audiences of the 1880s and 90s, to whom he was known (and billed) as "The King of the Comic Song", Donelly, an Alabamian, was privately known by colleagues as "The Bastard from Birmingham". He was reputed to have scouts on his payroll check out any other act with whom he was to perform and then pressure the theatre to place him earlier on the bill—where he would deliberately employ catch-phrases or business from the other act's routine. Paradoxically generous financially, he endowed several charities that cared for Vaudeville retirees.

Virginia Espinoza (1894-1923): Claiming to have studied with the Ballets Russes in Paris, her terpsichorean education actually took place in a rented room above her father's saloon on the Barbary Coast. But, though she danced only in Vaudeville, her performances were said to be the equal of anything seen on the classical stage. In a startling career change at 23, she moved to Hollywood and became the comic and romantic foil of Benny Dyson, one of many second-string Chaplin imitators, in a popular series of two-reelers. Her death during a party on a private yacht moored off Santa Monica is still shrouded in mystery.

Uther Fitzgerald (1878-1912): Once a serious Monologist, specialising in stentorian declamations of speeches from Shakespeare, Fitzgerald found his true calling one night in 1906 when performing in front of a particularly rowdy and unreceptive crowd in Kansas. Stopping mid-way through one of Richard II's duller soliloquies, he challenged any man in the room to come up and silence him. The standing ovation he received after his on-stage thrashing of the local ruffian who was foolish enough to take him up on it led to 'The Challenge' becoming a permanent part of his act. After years of fame as "The Shakespearean Pugilist", he was shot in the back while leaving a Baltimore theatre, his assassin a local tough whom he had bested earlier that evening.

Tamara ("Tommy") Goldstein (1883-1937): A huge favourite on the big-city circuit, Goldstein's cross-dressing act was never popular in the hinterlands—apparently because her stage persona Tommy (an outrageously bawdy young-man-on-the-make)—was so utterly convincing that provincial audiences never got the joke. The more sophisticated urban crowds loved "his" innuendo-fuelled jokes and flirtatious delivery of love-songs to the female members of the audience. Keeping her figure slim and her hair short, Goldstein managed to maintain Tommy's youthful onstage appearance into her early 50s. Returning to America from a successful European tour in 1937, she was among the passengers killed in the crash of the airship Hindenburg.

Stefan Holderlin (1863-1931): Originally a third-rate song-and-dance man, Holderlin dropped out of sight in the mid '90s and returned to the boards in 1902 having reinvented himself as "Holderlin The Uncanny", specialising in magic and mesmerism. Claiming (falsely) to be the great-grandson of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin, he also attested to having learned his preternatural skills in a secret Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas, something that was never disproved but is considered unlikely. He enjoyed nearly two decades of success and then, retiring from the stage, spent the last ten years of his life writing increasingly-esoteric books on the occult, the most popular being Splinters of the Infinite, still in print today.

Ramona Inamorata (1881-1919): Inamorata had one of the strangest acts in the history of Vaudeville. A professional Stigmatist, she would appear on stage, heralded by sacred organ music and clad in Nun's robes, and bleed spontaneously from her palms and feet in evocation of Christ's suffering on the cross. By all accounts this ridiculous—indeed sacrilegious—performance was usually greeted in pious and approving silence in even the most traditionally rowdy houses and local priests would often appear at her shows to lend support. Though attacked in print by many serious theologians, nobody ever managed to prove her act a fake. At the age of 38, having amassed quite a fortune, she left a note in her upstate New York home leaving all her money to charity and ending with the simple phrase "Our Lord has told me to meet him in the hills". Witnesses saw her walking into a heavily wooded area late that afternoon. She has never been seen since.

Though they never appear on stage as their living selves, these Vaudevillians should be regarded by the actors of the production as their "characters". It is the Vaudevillians who will take on the various roles of the play. It's up to you which of the Vaudevillians gets to play which (and how many) role(s) in the play. Their ages at the time of their deaths may be ignored—in performance, they are incarnated at whatever age they wish to be.

The central conceit of the play is that the story of The Djinn is being told/performed by this group of long-deceased Vaudevillians in order to entertain the recently-arrived newly-dead before the latter move on to whatever eternal fate awaits them.

2. The Program. Only as they are seated do the members of the audience receive t heir programs. On the back page is the following notice:

IMPORTANT NOTE

This is not really a program. You are not really in a theatre. The car in which you drove tonight had an accident. You did not survive. Please remain calm. Do not discuss this note with those sitting nearby. You cannot be sure who they are. Your orientation will begin shortly after this evening's entertainment.

At the front, over to stage-right, is an easel-like STAND. On the stand are stacked various TITLE-CARDS like those that used to introduce individual acts in Vaudeville. Right now they are covered by a CLOTH draped over the stand.

Further back, away from the centre, is a large TRUNK. It contains various props and pieces of costume.

AMPS and DRUMS are pre-set off to the side. Immediately before the play begins, the HOUSE-LIGHTS dim halfway and the footlights come halfway up. The house-band—three Commedia dell'Arte CLOWNS bearing electric guitars and drumsticks—enter and take up their positions. House-lights and footlights go down. The play begins: