Sunday, October 12th, 2008

Weekend Review: "Love"

“Love”

Cirque du Soleil

OPEN RUN

Unlike VH1, Cirque du Soleil is never about the music. The performance group that somehow turned the clown-and-acrobat circus into an art succeeds because of the stunts onstage, not the musical backdrop that paces the performance. In Cirque shows, music acts as a metronome, an instrument of timing, and it’s fitting that as the company’s productions have increased in grandeur, their music has flattened. It comes as a surprise that “Love,” the newest Cirque production that opened last weekend at the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, uses The Beatles as its musical inspiration. Packing almost 30 songs into a 90-minute show, “Love” moves firmly into the realm of VH1 and music videos, but in a good way. The show’s director, Dominic Champagne, interprets the songs well more often than not, adding new visuals to the pop anthems everyone already knows. The numbers range widely in style, mirroring the band’s interest in experimenting. “Drive My Car” is an upbeat dance number around an old VW bug that looks like an alternate opening sequence to an Austin Powers movie, while “Blackbird” features a comedic doctor trying to teach four birds to fly. All the Cirque staples are in place, with people bouncing off trampolines, performing acrobatics and dancing aerial ballets. Perhaps because the stunts and performances fit safely, if somewhat dully, into Cirque du Soleil’s stock of party tricks, “Love” departs from the company’s tradition and emphasizes its music. When you’re dealing with The Beatles, that’s an easy decision, but it changes the overall experience of the show – walking out of the theater, people are more likely to hum melodies than debate their favorite stunt. “Love” also allows The Beatles to sneak from the speakers to the stage. With fancy lighting design, one segment recreates the band members as shadows walking across the stage. Four empty tricycles do the same during “Yesterday.” The empty images conjure the idea of something missing, clearly the band. If “Love” is an attempt to make The Beatles seem alive, it fails, but even considering such an argument is an attempt to dive into a wading pool. In Las Vegas, invocation does not lead to metaphor, and a show that implies the band’s presence only wants people to remember that they like The Beatles, too. The ushers at “Love” all wear British police costumes and speak in laughably bad British accents; like everything in Las Vegas, they cheaply reproduce something else, in this case the hip London of the 1960s in which The Beatles, not Coldplay, ruled popular culture. It’s not authentic, but it’s trying hard enough to convince your imagination to stop minding the gaps. – Jake Tracer