Blackbird scarves. White (octopus) hat liners. Jellyfish cagoules. Siamese twin pants. Lucy’s LSD sous-maillots. This may read like the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear, but they are in fact the labels on what is surely the world’s most unusual wardrobe rack.
I’ve been granted exclusive backstage access to Cirque du Soleil’s production of the Beatles Love in Las Vegas, which last year celebrated its 10th anniversary with a wholescale refresh of the show. I’m worried that the experience will be like in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy pulls back the curtains during a terrifying display of magic to reveal that the great and powerful wizard is really just an old fraud pulling levers. In fact, a glimpse into the technical wizardry and astonishing physical skills behind a Cirque du Soleil show makes you appreciate it all the more.
I watch as Ghislain Malardier, elfin-featured and cueball-bald like Riff-Raff in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, transforms himself before the makeup mirror into the Fool. With 67 artists to get ready each night, he explains, it’s more practical if they all learn to do their own makeup.
In a huge, hangar-like space, props and costumes are neatly arranged: there’s a bizarre sculpture of musical instruments all welded together – which proves actually to be wearable – and the outsized hands of the Blue Meanies, from the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine, attached to a selection of furry coats. What child hasn’t dreamed of running off to join the circus? (Except, perhaps, former prime minister John Major, who eschewed his father’s trapeze artistry to become an accountant.) Trying on the Blue Meanie costume is a thrill.
But the most eye-opening room is the rehearsal space where the dancers and acrobats are limbering up – even when they are hardly even trying, their physicality is astonishing. One starts to do handstands, then graduates to one-armed handstands, then one-armed handstand press-ups. You can’t imagine how that’s even possible.
When I emerge to take my seat in the main theatre at the Mirage hotel-casino, the place is already packed and hums with eager anticipation. And then … the Beatles’ peerless harmonies swoon out from 6,000 new in-seat speakers and across five decades: “Aaaaa, aaaaah. Because the world is round, it turns me on, aa-aa-aa-aa-aaah.” A stately procession of men takes the stage with dry ice pouring down from their outstretched umbrellas, acrobats descend in slo-mo from ropes, and we’re off on a magical history tour of the Beatles’ lives and hits.
The show has been extensively revamped since I last saw it three years ago, with the full approval of surviving Beatles Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and the two widows – Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison – who all came together to a preview. As Kati Renaud, the original production’s artistic director – now senior director of show quality for Cirque du Soleil – will later explain to me: “The show had been evolving, but the director, Dominic Champagne, still didn’t feel it quite reached his vision of what he wanted it to be. The 10th anniversary, last year, was the opportunity to realise that vision, not just in the storyline, but in the technology now available.
“One thing that stood out was the nostalgia of the show. In 2006, Dominic wanted to portray his personal, emotional ride with the Beatles growing up, and the show ended up having a sepia palette: even though it was enveloped in love, there was something nostalgic about it. Whereas, at the time, the Beatles made people go crazy and wild! So we thought: ‘how could we tap into that feeling?’”
The show is now pacier and far more colourful. Of the songs, which were mashed up and remixed by original Beatles producer George Martin and his son Giles, and then remastered again last year to accommodate a new, even more state-of-the-art sound system, I Am the Walrus is out, and Twist and Shout is in. The latter is a rainbow riot of 60s-inspired costumes, with people dancing on the roof of a painted Volkswagen Beetle driven on to the stage.
Something, which opens with “something in the way she moves”, is accompanied by four white-clad women, attached to wires, gliding and tumbling through the air so gracefully that it’s like a dream of flight. When John Lennon sings: “Help me get my feet back on the ground” in Help!, it’s given literal form by roller skaters flipping off huge ramps in backward somersaults. “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, from Tomorrow Never Knows, is the cue for parachute silk to spread out over the stage and front rows to form a billowing sea, with a boat bobbing in the centre. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds provokes a hallucinatory landscape of flying, illuminated jellyfish.
Some of the new tech, especially the video projection design by Dandypunk, is astonishing. As the Fab Four are shown in silhouette on a gauze curtain, the performers fire outlandish animations at them from “guns”. During Lady Madonna, a dozen Mary Quantesque dancers splash on multicoloured puddles of light – an echo, Renaud says, of the Sea of Holes from Yellow Submarine.
This all probably sounds daft – and indeed it is. It’s completely hatstand. But what words cannot express adequately is the feeling the show produces. My honest, unadorned reaction is captured in my notebook: “Wow! Amazing, mental, brilliant,” I wrote at one point. Afterwards, my jaw was aching, and I eventually realised why: my mouth had been open wide in amazement for much of the show.
“People will see things and hear things in our show,” says Renaud, “which later they won’t remember, as there’s just so much going on. But though they may not recall the bubbles of smoke or the something in the way she moves girl, one thing they will never forget is how they feel, how amazing it was, how they were touched.”
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