Hatin' the Love

So tonight we continued our grand tour of Vegas Cirque du Soleil shows with Love, the Beatles tribute production at the Mirage. Let me be perfectly frank on this: It sucked ass.

I had a bad feeling almost from the start. After being directed into the theatre by a faux-Liverpudlian dressed as Sgt. Pepper, we waited around about 40 minutes for the show to begin. If you've ever been to a Cirque show, you know that to tide the audience over, eventually a clown is dispatched into the audience to amuse them during the last fifteen minutes or so of the wait. Usually he wants you to help open the lid to his jar of rainbows, or merely to molest you.

We got the Fool on the Hill character, who was about as whimsical as Andy Dick. As in, he was hyper and babbling incoherently, and you wanted to punch him immediately. He got a chilly reception from our section of the seating, and promptly left. I watched him roam the theatre, being rebuffed by each section.

I must say, this show got the least amount of applause or enthusiasm from its audience of any of the Cirque shows I've seen yet. The crowd was mostly MGM-Mirage employees there for a fund raising benefit, and skewed grey. During and afterwards, I heard mostly complaints from them about being bored. I don't think I clapped at all except at the end, out of politeness and relief.

The production itself was almost entirely devoid of circus performances. There were a lot of dancers, who didn't really do much of anything except stalk slowly across the stage in the trademark Cirque style, or bop in place to the music and then walk away. A couple times, people grabbed onto ropes and were hoisted up, but they didn't do anything once they got up in the air except hold on tight. Your average high-school gym class has more rope-climbing action than this show.

One thing missing from this Beatles show: The Beatles! While there were plenty of barely recognizable characters from their songs wandering around on stage (not really doing anything, just walking), it wasn't clear what they were supposed to represent. Okay, the guy in the military uniform? Sgt. Pepper. The girls dressed as go-go dancers? Hmm. The people in bathrobes walking around aimlessly while the WWII bombing footage plays on big screens? You got me there. The big screens showed lame Flash animations that tried to mask the fact that the cast wasn't doing anything interesting. They didn't sing, because the Beatles music was piped in. They didn't jump or perform acrobatics. They kind of danced, and by danced I mean flailed their arms around briefly before returning to walking aimlessly. Um, yeah. There was lots and lots of aimless walking, like you'd do in a postapocalyptic wasteland while waiting to compete at the Thunderdome. Weird. There were usually no less than thirty of these characters onstage walking around at any given moment, all in strange costumes, but none really memorable or outstanding. They were just there. The Beatles themselves were never represented onstage. We saw silhouettes of impersonators projected onto screens, and faceless dwarfs in plastic mop-tops, but no footage of the actual band.

The whole point of the production was to accompany a remixed soundtrack of classic Beatles music. It was supposed to be a mash-up of their most famous tunes, heard for the first time digitally remastered (the band has never released restored, CD-quality versions of their albums, just like they've never put their music online). The sound was good, but the "remixes" were barely different than the originals. Wherefore art thou, DJ Dangermouse?! All of the re-imagining was done by the band's original producer under the watchful eye of their estates. People close to the original music are the last people on earth you'd want charged with altering it, because they're not going to add anything new, and will be the most timid in sticking to the original versions they hold dear. So you hear a single chord from one song, and then it launches into another similar song which you then hear in its entirety, unaltered. You'd be better off just getting the original albums, if they're ever released in decent quality. I doubt they will be anytime soon, otherwise there'd be no reason to buy this soundtrack.

Overall, I think I could have done a better job of creating this show. And I say that as a person with no music inclinations at all, who can't even whistle, let alone play an instrument. But I had it all created in my mind before I went in, and that version was far, far superior to what I saw. This looks like it was all just thrown together to capitalize on the soundtrack album, and to get that onto the shelves quickly in time for Christmas and before some punk DJ tries to remix it all on their own again without permission. They didn't have time to choreograph anything decent, so everyone walks around. They couldn't convince the band to do anything fresh, so they did the bare minimum to call the songs mash-ups. Why and how is this a Cirque show? Why is it playing in Vegas, and not in a dinner theatre in Akron?

Why am I still writing this? I'm going to bed.

EDIT: Jenn has a point in her review, as well. The dancers weren't hot at all. What the fuck, Cirque? Did Quebec finally run out of good-looking people?!