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 }
