Vegas Shows the Beatles Some "Love"

04/20/2006 11:10 AM, E! Online


If all Cirque du Soleil needed was love, then the Beatles' song catalog was probably a smart place to look.

Tickets went on sale Wednesday for Love, the latest offering from the Canadian acrobatic troupe, which will combine vintage Las Vegas spectacle with tried and true hits from the Fab Four.

While the show will feature Cirque's trademark "ooh" and "ah"-inducing stunts, the 60 performers will also don '60s-era kitsch by way of roller skates and ride BMX bikes around the set choreographed to a score comprised entirely of Beatles tunes.

"Love is really the strongest theme of what the Beatles used to create their songs," Cirque du Soleil creative director Gilles Ste-Croix told the Associated Press. "From their first song, their first success, it was about love, to the last song they recorded." (Yes, those Let It Be sessions were so full of love.)

According to Cirque du Soleil's Website, the idea for Love was originally inspired by the friendship and admiration between "quiet Beatle" George Harrison, who died in 2001, and Cirque founder Guy Laliberte.

This project is the first theatrical collaboration for record label Apple Corps Ltd., which has kept its Beatles catalog under strict lock and key for decades. Plans to finally make the classic tunes available for (legal) downloading were publicly confirmed Thursday.

Sir George Martin, the Beatles' main producer, and his son, Giles, were allowed unprecedented access to the band's catalog to pick out music for the new show. Using master tapes from Abbey Road Studios, the Martins spent two years piecing together Love's score, according to Cirque's Website.

"One of the challenges of the job was getting the balance of the songs right," the elder Martin said in a statement. "We wanted to make sure there are enough good, solid hit songs in the show, but we don't want it to be a catalog of 'best of's.' We also wanted to put in some interesting and not well-known Beatles music and use fragments of songs."

Audiences will have to wait to hear what made the final cut until the show's June 30 premiere at the Mirage hotel. Love will now be the featured show at the Mirage, taking the place of the Siegfried & Roy magic act, which closed after illusionist Roy Horn was almost mauled to death onstage in 2003 by one of the tigers in their show. Siegfried & Roy was a staple at the hotel for years.

Love will take place in a brand-new 2,013-seat theater that took two years to build. High-definition video images will be projected onto panoramic 100-foot-tall screens and each seat is equipped with three speakers, adding new meaning to the term "surround sound."

"Our mission was to try and achieve the same intimacy we get when listening to the master tapes at the studio," Giles Martin said. "The songs sound so alive...People are going to be knocked out by what they are hearing!" (Literally, perhaps.)

Love is the fifth Cirque du Soleil show to take residence on the Las Vegas Strip, joining Mystere, O, Zumanity and KA.

Broadway behemoths The Phantom of the Opera, The Producers and Monty Python's Spamalot are also heading to the Strip in coming months.

Love is not the Beatles' first trip to the theater in recent months. Lennon, a biographical show about John Lennon set to the late Beatle's music and words, closed after only 49 performances last year. Despite the classic tunes, critics weren't too impressed. The New York Times called Lennon "the latest in the bland crop of shows known as jukebox musicals that have been spreading over Broadway like kudzu" (which, for all of us who don't know what that means, is some sort of quick-growing weed).

But we can still believe in Love--for one, Martin is a part of the new Vegas venture, and he's the man who produced most of what the Beatles did between 1962 and 1969, aka "some pretty awesome music-making." And, if that doesn't help, you can at least count on heavily made-up dancers, trapeze artists and contortionists to give the show that little something extra.