The CD should capture Gere's vocal range and accompanying sound effects, but it won't match the body language and gestures he throws with great gusto into an extreme, physical performance.

Whether he's wearing Arabian garb, complete with slippers curled up at the toes, or slouching around in bare feet and a vintage aloha shirt, Gere is a virtual kaleidoscope. In some of the passionate scenes — a reminder that these are stories for adults — one could swear he literally turns himself inside out.

There are a few props, but most of the action takes place in our imaginations.

His first episode is gleaned from personal experience at an Italian villa, where the host recounts the story of a medieval ancestor whose ghost continues to haunt the home. She's a Medici who takes up with a lover while her husband is away at war. Informed of her infidelity, the husband involves her cowardly lover in a macabre death scene that drips with blood and horror.

Next, he borrows a candle-powered shadow-puppet screen from his Arabian Nights show to enact how a jealous first wife changes her husband's son into a barnyard bull, and how a shepherd's daughter turns the tables on the sorceress.

The third tale is a long and bloody story of shock and awe featuring a Middle Eastern Christian man beguiled by passion into repeated entanglements of sex and violence. As the plot unfolds, dancing girls entice, bodies are dismembered and minorities are persecuted — while gold changes hands and fortunes are made and lost.

Despite the gore and carnage, saying Gere keeps the material upbeat doesn't go far enough. His asides and transitions have an element of tongue-in-cheek to remind us that these are simply stories designed to enthrall and delight.

The second half of the program switches to local oral history with stories focused on the supernatural, dark side of Hawaiian culture.

The first is told by the father of a girl who is possessed — "Exorcist"-style — as a result of a misappropriated poi pounder. Only after the father returns the ancient artifact to its original location does the girl's torment stop.

The second is a wonderfully tense story by a Hawaiian woman whose two grandmothers — one Christian, the other a spell-casting kahuna — battle for their granddaughter's allegiance. In the telling, Gere transforms into the now old woman, petrified at entering the room where her grandmother practiced her dark arts and, later, into her nonchalant, chain-smoking husband, whose matter-of-fact observations are every bit as chilling.