Needles and Opium, written and directed by Robert Lepage. English Translation by Jenny Montgomery. Presented by ArtsEmerson at the Emerson/Cutler Majestic Theatre, Boston, MA, through April 12.

By Bill Marx

Lepage’s giant magic cube in “Needles and Opium.” Photo: Nicola-Frank Vachon.

This wonder work from Canadian director Robert Lepage isn’t here for much time, alas, and I don’t have enough time to write the ecstatic review this piece so richly deserves. Suffice it to say that this revamping of one of the master’s early works is jaw-dropping and eye-popping at the same time. You spend so much time awed by its graceful techno-theatricality that you find it hard to concentrate on the poetic content, which is a tragic-comic reverie about pain, freedom, dreams, and broken hearts. Somehow Lepage miraculously weaves together three stories of frustrated travelers: Miles Davis reveling in a non-racist Paris in the late ’40s, falling in love with singer Juliette Gréco, and then returning alone to New York and heroin addiction; Lepage himself in Paris during the late ’80s, voicing a documentary about Davis and Gréco, and finally, floating above it all like a gallic god, French author/filmmaker Jean Cocteau, reading from his writings, particularly passages he wrote after visting New York for the American premiere of his 1948 film The Eagle with Two Heads.

All of this emotional and intellectual allusiveness (and ambiguity) is set in a giant cube that rotates about with balletic grace, ace performer Marc Labrèche donning anti-gravity boots (?) to float about in the heavens as Cocteau and then tumble down to earth to play Lepage in a recording studio. Wellesley Robertson III as a silent Miles Davis revolves from love to despair (and round about the cube) with horn in hand. Holograms, video, slides, doors flopping open and closes, trapdoors, music, movement, the stars above, the hells below — it is all here, magic made miraculous. Don’t be afraid to gawk.