Fascination! Newsletter

As reported through Theater Mania and Cirque du Soleil’s Facebook pages, the company of Banana Shpeel is set to participate in an open house on February 10th at New York City’s Beacon Theatre. Information regarding festivities follows in this excerpt from TheaterMania:

The festivities will get underway at 4:30pm with the unveiling of the show’s marquee at the theater. Performers will arrive, accompanied by musicians, to greet fans. In addition, the first 100 guests who arrive with a banana will win two complimentary tickets to the show. The bananas will be donated to Life Center, a local New York homeless shelter.

At 4:45pm, the Banana Shpeel cast will lead the public into the theater for the Open House with an exclusive sneak peek at the show’s creative process in the newly-restored Beacon Theatre. Guests will see rehearsals on stage, make-up demonstrations, costume displays, and take photos with costumed performers. Local restaurants and businesses will provide complimentary snacks.

{ SOURCE: Theater Mania }

The Las Vegas Weekly took a trip to Cirque du Soleil’s international headquarters in Montréal recently and got a peek into its ever evolving factory and wrote about it. Check out this interesting article from Steve Freiss!

I had been here six years earlier, for a Newsweek piece in advance of Cirque’s third permanent Vegas show, Zumanity. But somehow I had forgotten, until I hopped off said city bus earlier this month, just how drab and remarkably unremarkable the place appears from the outside.

Of course, like anything Cirque-ish, appearances are deceptive, and there’s a lot going on inside that makes more sense of the weird universe launched into the world from these parts. But a reasonable first impression is that it looks from the street like an auto plant, and Cirque president and CEO Daniel Lamarre only reinforces that notion with this factory analogy: “I can easily see Cirque developing two to three new shows a year. Right now, we have 20 shows. It doesn’t matter if we have 30 or 35 shows or 40 or 50 shows.”

With that remark, Lamarre is actually making a point about the importance of maintaining quality control, of having the resources and the staff to create and perform that many productions. But then again, he is totally serious about those numbers. It’s staggering to imagine a world with 50 Cirque shows in it. But clearly not to him—he believes without hesitation that two or three new shows a year is a reasonable plan.

Read the full article here.

{ SOURCE: Las Vegas Weekly }

… not been officially released yet, and we here at Fascination cannot be sure this is the name of Tour 2010 set to launch in Montréal on April 22nd, but something new has been registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in regards to Cirque du Soleil and what it is has piqued our interested. On January 19th and again on the 20th, Cirque du Soleil and its legal staff applied for a new service trademarks accross the board on many varieties of goods and services ranging from media to paper goods, collectibles, clothing and other forms of merchandise – much like it did for OVO before it’s name was announced.

So, what was registered this time?

Highlight between the brackets below to see the name — we’re hiding so we don’t spoil it for those who don’t want to know…

[ TOTEM ]

Keep in mind that this is not official until Cirque du Soleil announces it!

From our friends at CirqueTribune comes a post from user “Stretchy” who discovered some interesting concept art for KÀ while browsing Mark Fisher’s website. Mr. Fisher is credited as SEt Designer on KÀ, playing at MGM Grand hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

Check out some of these designs and get a peek into what KÀ could have looked like!

http://www.stufish.com/cirque-du-soleil/k-las-vegas/concept.html

{ SOURCE: CirqueTribune }

Daniel Brusilovsky on CrunchGear’s blogs recently caught up with Gerald Edwards-Webb, the Technical Director of OVO, and took a peek behind the scenes at Cirque du Soleil’s OVO. One of the places Mr. Brusilovsky got to peek under, was the stage:

Gerard took me were not too many folks go to go — under the stage. What most people also don’t know is that there is only about 4-10 feet from the bottom of the stage, to the concrete floor that the show is setup on. So the actors use moving carts to travel across under the stage to get from one place to another. The stage is quite complex, and uses a various amounts of different material, and even includes three trampolines. I shoot some video of the main trampoline bed opening in the middle of the stage. The trampoline bed opens up in a matter of seconds, and uses a hydraulic system to actually open and close.

Read the full article here.

{ SOURCE: CrunchGear }