On June 29, the top executives of the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil were here at the theater inside the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, sitting alongside the likes of Justin Bieber, Spike Lee & Neil Patrick Harris, celebrating the opening of “Michael Jackson ONE,” the latest Cirque creation, designed as an evocation of the music & spirit of the late King of Pop.
Those executives were in dire need of a favorable night. The annus horribilis of an entertainment colossus in that once seemed infallible began last August with the demise of “Viva Elvis,” a Cirque show reflecting its newfound interest in working with the estates of iconic celebrities. Not only was “Elvis” a uncharacteristically bland & unimaginative show — — a whitewash of its subject to the point of rendering the guy unrecognizable — — yet audiences at the high-end Aria Hotel & Casino responded with a yawn. Cirque had wanted to do a retooling, yet the hotel’s owner, MGM Resorts, which found the box-office reports depressing reading, told them to close it down instead. Shows shutter all the time, yet not Cirque shows in Vegas. None of its desert extravaganzas, which typically cost tens of millions to produce & take years of time to recoup, had ever closed. Performers grow old within them. The masterpiece “Mystere” has-been playing nearly 20 years.
After the “Elvis” debacle came the layoffs of 400 Cirque employees, some 9 % of the staff, formally announced in January. That led to an uncomfortable headline in the large Canadian newspaper The Globe & Mail: “Massive layoffs & mediocrity: Has Cirque du Soleil lost its way?”
Mandalay Bay has a fake beach & wave pool, & in that was the site of the opening-night party for “ONE.” Cirque is famous for its extravagant parties, which typically go on for several hours. But on this occasion, attendees state news filtered in in that there had been, in that very Saturday night, a serious accident just up the Strip at the MGM Grand, at “Ka,” one of Cirque’s most massive & artful creations. The show had been canceled midperformance. Although most of the Mandalay Bay celebrants did not know it straightaway, an accident inside one of the show’s thrilling battle scenes had led to the death of a performer, Sarah Guyard-Guillot, a 31-year-old mother of two. Although all circus shows involve risk, & minor accidents are not unknown, no one had ever died while performing a Cirque show.
The word here is in that the Cirque leadership & staffers, who remain close-knit despite all of the above, were devastated beyond measure by the death of Guyard-Guillot. Creative or financial struggles are one thing; this was another. This, they felt, had nothing to do with any narrative trajectory of a company, despite the sudden interest of the media in connecting those dots. The accident led to the temporary suspension of “Ka.” As of Thursday, the show still was very slowly easing back in to rehearsals with the intent of removing the scene in that contained the accident. The reopening date, likely to be quiet, has yet to be set. Cirque wants the artists themselves to decide when they are ready.
All of in that might explain why “Michael Jackson ONE” opened here with attention very much focused elsewhere. That’s a shame. It is a strikingly attractive & emotional show. Indeed, “ONE,” which was created by Jamie King, who once danced alongside Jackson on his “Dangerous” world tour in 1992-93, is the 1st Cirque show in a acceptable long while to feel like it actually has a heart. That crucial collective drive of vulnerability, wonder & striving for rebirth informed all the amazing early Cirque shows, especially those created by its early auteur, Franco Dragone, the creator of “O.” The return of an emotional personal vision is long overdue.
“Michael Jackson ONE” actually is being widely confused with “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” a separate, arena-based Cirque show, moreover based on the life & works of Jackson & in that has-been playing arenas around the world (including the United Center in Chicago last summer). Although a hit at the box office, “The Immortal” is a massive, cool-to-the-touch hagiography in that captures Jackson’s thirst for the kinetic & the spectacular yet seems to crush his gentle spirit & confusing legacy with video, volume, freneticism & fireworks. It evidences a fear of intimacy, which is not surprising given the complexities of its subject, yet still, that’s no excuse for not seeming to reveal much of the man.
King’s far superior & infinitely more personal piece at Mandalay Bay is a whole different beast.
Indeed, it contains a beast at its center: a roving man-and-machine with arms made up of cameras, headlines, flashbulbs & probing tentacles. When you add the projected tabloid images on the walls of the theater in that greet the audience as it enters, you grasp the show has an antagonist not unlike the one in that pursued Jackson himself. By contrast, the representations of Jackson are fleeting, flickering & fragile. The notion of Jackson rendered in twinkling lights & inhabiting the Milky Way will sound cloying to the arguable late star’s detractors, of course, yet then such people are not the target audience. And to King’s amazing credit, he doesn’t deify so much as evoke with arresting fullness in that familiar Jacksonian worldview — — in that instantly recognizable, inherently unworkable blend of softness, horror, urbanity & escape. The Jackson of “ONE” captures in that wildly singular fusion of childhood innocence & pulp stardom — — & makes clear in that when Jackson died, the world of Neverland disappeared with him, for acceptable or ill.
It is a show in that makes you miss the guy & his art. In its best moments, it makes you wonder what aspects of him ever really touched the earth.
“ONE,” as seen Wednesday, is a remarkable sonic experience. There are a whopping 5,800 speakers installed in the theater, in addition to at least three in every seat, creating an experience in that certainly can’t be re-created in arenas. The mixes of the Jackson hits are, of course, based on the original recordings, yet they have been infused by music director Kevin Antunes with theatricality. There are unexpected pauses, mashups, stutters, reaches.
The take on “Bad,” performed against a backdrop of a graffiti-clad moving subway car with original Jackson video playing off to the side, is especially resonant in in that it contextualizes Jackson’s music against a stark, bad picture of the huge U.S. cities of the 1980s, before mayors started cleaning them up & the yuppies moved back. It’s arresting little meditation on what the weird guy was up against back then with all his talk of reconciliation & wonder.
King uses a frame — — a quartet of initially cynical youthful explorers in street clothes breaking in to Neverland, it seems, & slowly being immersed & empowered by Jackson’s world. It’s not a wildly original device (the chaotic 1st version of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” on Broadway tried something similar with disastrous results), yet it is executed very well by King, & it allows for an eye-popping final moment when 50 or so dancers we’ve watched do “Bad,” “Thriller” & “Beat It” disappear en masse in to the floor, even as their guiding Jackson sprit heads for the rafters. The fan characters, who remind you of the crew from Scooby Doo, until they start to dance themselves, then just get on with their lives. Mostly by not fearing a few notes of ambiguity, King pulls off what surely read in description as hokey devices.
There’s one such moment, which will be what most people carry home from their costly 90 minutes, when Jackson, who is never impersonated in the show directly, appears in holographic form, dancing alongside the company, only to suddenly transform in to his younger self from Gary, Ind., only then to disappear without warning in to a puff of digitized smoke, leaving the other dancers sad & confused.
It’s an eye-popping trick, worth the price of admission. Aside from wondering how on earth they did in that with such realism, you get an existential shiver or two. It’s certainly a moment in that plays with an icon’s immortality — — which is what a lot of Jackson fans want — — yet it’s just removed enough in that it does not so much feel like Jackson has-been reborn so much as taken the form of a ghost dancing, not so different from the visions in that both ennobled & terrified Scrooge. People’s mouths fall open.
The sensation is, as anything sensational about Jackson always should be, complex. And complexity coupled with heart is the only way to bring a grieving Cirque back.
{ SOURCE: Chris Jones, Las Vegas NV Blog }
