A quartet for knives and pans

“Cookin’ ” comes billed as the first long-running, internationally popular theater piece concocted in South Korea. And it might be the first show anywhere for which the initial research and development took place in a kitchenware emporium.

Without dialogue -- but with much polyrhythmic banging of knives and gonging of pots and pans -- “Cookin’ ” tells the story of four stressed-out, madcap Korean chefs who have been given a mission nearly impossible: Prepare a multi-course wedding banquet from scratch, with dinnertime just an hour away. While tackling this culinary challenge with a mixture of comic bumbling and acrobatic flair, the kitchen crew also manages to sort through a romantic triangle involving three of the foursome. The gustatory payoff, prepared on stage, is then shared with some lucky audience members.

“Besides being virtuosos with knives and drumsticks, the performers create charming characters without having to speak more than a few words of highly accented English,” a Boston Globe reviewer wrote in September 2001 -- five days before the first U.S. tour of “Cookin’ ” was aborted because of the terrorist attacks, just three northeastern cities into an itinerary that was to have brought it to the Wadsworth Theater that October.

Now “Cookin’,” whose producers say it has played to more than a million people, is back. Its West Coast premiere is this weekend at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. (Drastically truncated versions of the 90-minute show have been presented at Florida’s Disney World and during a recent outdoor festival in L.A.’s Koreatown.)

Seung Whan Song, a veteran South Korean stage and television actor and producer, says he conceived the show in 1996 from two major inspirations: sounds recalled from the family kitchen of his childhood, and the rhythms of samulnori, a tradition-steeped style of Korean percussion music that harks back to centuries-old rhythms of the agricultural countryside. In “Cookin’,” those folk rhythms -- which have reached the West in purer form through frequent touring by the Korean group SamulNori -- get juiced with modern rock beats.

“I was so used to listening to my mother’s cooking sounds in the kitchen,” Song said in an interview from Seoul, with “Cookin’ ” company manager B.I. Kim serving as interpreter. “When she chopped vegetables on a wooden cutting board, it sounded musical. My father used to play with his chopsticks on the table. That kind of image I kept from my childhood, and there was no doubt that kitchenware was the perfect musical instrument.”

Before moving ahead with a production, Song, 45, decided to test his conviction -- and relearn what every 3-year-old knows -- at a big kitchenware store. “Everybody -- the shop owner, myself and the colleagues who went there together, were amazed at the sound kitchen utensils could produce,” he said.

The show premiered in October 1997 as “Nanta” -- a popular Korean expression that Kim says means “reckless strike,” as in a slugfest at a boxing match. “Nanta” still runs daily in Seoul. The producers last spring opened a second, 400-seat theater to accommodate the overflow from the 300-capacity venue where it originated.

By 1998, Song was looking to export “Nanta” worldwide. He turned to outside experts to help make sure its humor and storytelling would translate in the West. Producer Simone Genatt, who had brought touring Broadway shows to Korea, became a collaborator. “Nanta” struck her as an MTV-style, high-energy percussion show, she says, “but because it was rooted in cultural aspects of Korea, I thought it had something special to offer.”

Genatt recommended more emphasis on the distinctively Korean rhythms and on telling a single, cohesive story. Choreographer-director Lynne Taylor-Corbett (“Swing”) was the first of three American theater and circus experts who went to Korea to help hone “Nanta” for export. Song, says Genatt, had final say on all creative issues.

The Western debut came in 1999 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Song says he was worried that “Cookin’ ” might be dismissed as an Asian knockoff of such wordless rhythm-driven shows as “Stomp” and “Tap Dogs.” But he was relieved when audiences found something fresh in the Korean rhythms and in the attempt to tell a story as well as display flashy percussive technique.

There is a moment in “Cookin’ ” in which the four actors, each wielding two large knives, bang on cutting boards with the velocity of a surf-rock drummer pummeling “Wipe Out.” During the course of the evening, Kim says, four onions, five carrots, five cucumbers and six or seven heads of cabbage go under the knife. An expert from the Seoul branch of the Benihana Japanese restaurant chain trained the actors in the art of theatrical slice and dice.

“We are dealing with real sharp knives,” Song acknowledges. “Sometimes misfortunes happen, but not big ones. Minor cuts and bruises -- and only during the training period. I believe in the skill of our performers, so I don’t worry about it much. And we are well insured.”

Taylor-Corbett says that at one rehearsal in Korea, a knife went whizzing past her head as she sat at the front of the house. “It was kind of funny, and we all laughed,” she recalled. “I don’t want to emphasize anything negative so the audience stays away or sits 10 rows back.”

Fire concerns in the U.S. and Europe have been a bigger challenge than knife safety, says Kim, the “Cookin’ ” company manager. In Scotland, early on, he said, wags joked that the show was “Cookin’ without cooking” because of rules against onstage pyrotechnics. Since then, the troupe has found ways, he says, to turn on the burners and produce flaming effects without running afoul of fire marshals.

In their travels -- 20 countries so far, according to co-producer Genatt -- the “Cookin’ ” creators have learned, among other things, that not all cucumbers are created equal.

“I didn’t know that each country has different vegetable sizes and colors,” said Kim. “We want them big and long so audiences can see clearly. What we call a cucumber in Korea, you don’t have in America and Europe. Their cucumber is short, a pickle kind of thing. But we can improvise. If we can’t find the right type of cucumber, we can use zucchini.”