From the Montreal Gazette:
The Cirque du Soleil’s Dralion is coming home for Christmas, reinvented as an arena mega-spectacle that will open at the Bell Centre on Dec. 18. This most Asian of all Cirque shows has come a long way since it made its rather shaky debut as a big top show in Montreal in 1999. This will be Dralion’s third Montreal appearance. The last was in 2003 while it was still a tent show. When Dralion was born, the stakes were high, the future of the company uncertain.
The creative team that had set the signature for the Cirque du Soleil’s first decade had stepped down, exhausted after the openings of two permanent mega-spectacles, O in Las Vegas and La Nouba at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. Director Franco Dragone, set designer Michel Crête, costume designer Dominique Lemieux and choreographer Debra Brown all went their separate ways. Composer René Dupéré had already left, after Alegria in 1994
To preserve a sense of continuity, the Cirque persuaded original artistic director and founder of the National Circus School, Guy Caron, to return. He had parted ways with the company in 1988, saying it was “growing too big, too fast.” (Another director, Philippe Decouflé, was initially hired for the Dralion job. But he dropped out in a panic, overwhelmed by the size of the project. Decouflé, too, rejoined the Cirque family, directing Iris in Los Angeles.)
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{ SOURCE: Montreal Gazette }
