For Cirque du Soleil, what happens in Vegas winds up in Toronto.
Kurios — Cabinet of Curiosities, the latest touring show from the Quebec company, opens at the Port Lands on Aug. 28. It’s a bold return to the early days of Cirque, filled with unique performers, a handmade style of design and a desire to entertain, rather than impress.
But the show’s origins can clearly be traced to Sin City on a night 14 months earlier.
June 29, 2013 was Cirque du Soleil’s Charles Dickens evening: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
At 11 p.m. that night, the opening night party for Michael Jackson: One was in full swing at the Mandalay Bay Resort, fuelled by the joyous realization that the losing streak of mostly unsuccessful shows that had plagued the company around the world for the past six years had finally come to an end.
But at that very moment, just a few blocks up the strip at the MGM Grand, the second show that night of Robert Lepage’s KA finished abruptly and tragically as an acrobat named Sarah Guyard-Guillot suddenly plummeted 15 metres to the ground and became the first performer in Cirque’s 29-year history to die during a performance.
It was a cathartic moment for the Quebec company which began as a group of ragtag street entertainers and had transformed themselves over three decades into one of the most successful entertainment empires ever, having played to over 90 million people around the world, employing 5,000 people from 40 countries and grossing $1 billion in 2013.
Their rags to riches story was the kind of saga people loved to follow and when they boldly confronted Las Vegas titan Steve Wynn to have their first show on the Strip, Mystere, done the way that they wanted it, everyone cheered, especially now that their Nevada empire has swelled to include eight shows which play to 9,000 people nightly.
But something went wrong along the way. And that night in Vegas was a powerful reminder to Cirque that the life of one artist meant more than all the commercial success in the world.
Around the time that the public became aware that Cirque’s founder Guy Laliberté had become a certified billionaire thanks to his worldwide troupe of travelling players, it also started to register that Cirque was producing too often, in too many places and the law of diminishing returns was starting to set in.
The numbers tell the story. In the first 15 years of their existence, they produced 11 shows. The next 15 years saw them producing 22. And Laliberté’s almost Napoleonic desire to conquer the world led to unsuccessful expeditions into Tokyo, Manhattan, Chicago and Los Angeles.
“They just started doing too much,” says Montreal Gazette theatre critic Pat Donnelly, a close observer of the Cirque scene from the very start. “There was an ill-advised foray into Los Angeles with Iris that lost them a bundle of money. Banana Shpeel in Chicago and New York just wasn’t their field of expertise.
“And even something that should have been a no-brainer, like doing Viva Elvis! in Vegas, put the wrong show in the wrong setting and the marriage didn’t work.”
Donnelly makes it clear that she believes Cirque has done and continues to do a lot of impressive work.
“They’ve had tremendous success, but when you put that many ships out to sea, some of them are likely to hit a few wrecks.” She recalls that giddy period during 2007-8 when Cirque opened eight shows around the world and says “I couldn’t keep up with them. Nobody could. I was exhausted. Their publicists were exhausted. Everyone was exhausted! They just kept throwing money at shows and it didn’t always fix them.”
And even though Cirque’s CEO, the prudent Daniel Lamarre, told the Star in 2008 that “we are out to do only one thing; to build the best show that anyone can build,” it was obvious by 2012 that things had gone out of control and a change was made.
That year, for the first time since 2005, only one show opened, the relatively simple touring production, Amaluna.
And although Michael Jackson: One was very much Cirque in its expansionist, go-big-or-go-home-celebrity-worshipping mode, the plans for that show had been generated over five years before and savvy Cirque minds knew that its success didn’t mean they could return to that path.
Besides closing several money-bleeding properties around the world, the best signal Cirque could send out to everyone about their future intentions would be what they produced on the stage, which is why Kurios is so important.
“Like many other artists, Cirque thrives on adversity,” says Donnelly “and what they did with Kurios was very revealing and very important.”
To direct this crucial show in the organization’s development, the founders of Cirque didn’t turn to an international superstar like Robert Lepage, a noted filmmaker like Francois Girard or a supernova American director like Diane Paulus, all of which had been recent choices.
Instead, they trusted the show to Michel Laprise, a hard-working theatre artist who has been with Cirque for 14 years, but as a talent scout and a special events designer, not a director.
“Sure it was a gamble to trust an in-house guy,” says Donnelly, “but it was a smart gamble. He understood theatre, he understood talent, he knew what Cirque was really all about.”
That was entertainment and originality.
On the bright May afternoon when Kurios was scheduled to open in Montreal, Laprise sat down in the theatre to talk about the show. He’s a compact man, vibrant, energetic and throughout the conversation various performers, technicians and craftsmen came up to hug him affectionately.
“You see how I work?” he laughed. “The artists are at the core of everything I do. When I was a young man and came to Cirque, I was hooked after one month. I knew this was where I wanted to be.”
Laprise admits that he was surprised when Laliberté asked him if he would direct the next Cirque production at this crucial time in their history, but he had his answer ready.
“I told him I would love to do it if I could recreate the emotion I had when I first came to Cirque. It gave a lot of meaning to my life and I wanted to recapture that.”
There’s a real closeness to the audience in Kurios, a lack of that often-pretentious artistic distance that Cirque had thrived on in recent years and Laprise admits it’s 100% intentional.
“I wanted to go back to the feeling we had when we were street performers. You had to grab people’s attention right away. Not with something spectacular, but with something original. With talent. I wanted to have something joyful like we have in the street, because we come from the street.”
And so the sets and props of Stéphane Roy are full of wooden gears and wheels, the costumes of Phillippe Guillotel have a deliciously handmade steampunk kind of feel, while the music of Raphael Beau and Bob & Bill brings back every haunting circus tune you’ve ever heard.
But it’s the artists who make the real difference: a truly eclectic collection of tumblers, jugglers, acrobats and zanies whose energy pours off the stage and into your heart.
As Peter Allen once wrote, “Everything old is new again,” and that’s the secret behind Kurios. By rediscovering its simple origins, Cirque du Soleil may just have discovered the way to make their second 30 years even more triumphant than their first.
“I think they’re back on track,” says Donnelly, and the public seems to be agreeing, with record-breaking attendance greeting the show’s first two runs in Montreal and Quebec City.
And now it’s Toronto’s turn.
“The audience,” says Laprise with a grin. “That’s always the secret ingredient.”
Kurios will run at Le Grand Chapiteau at the Port Lands until Oct. 26. For tickets, go to cirquedusoleil.com
{ SOURCE: Toronto Star | http://goo.gl/hcOuFr }
