Cirque du Soleil: LOVE
We saw this excellent show in Las Vegas after the Fast Pairs. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett has apparently also chosen to do early bridge events because they were sitting three rows in front of us.
This is a circus set entirely to Beatles music. The music had apparently been remixed and re-mashed-up from the master recordings by George Martin and sounded absolutely fantastic - if you are a Beatles fan, the music alone is worth the price of admission, as the CD recordings pale in comparison. Many of the vocals sounded double-tracked and the instrumentation was much richer.
Much of the set involved four male performers that looked vaguely like the Beatles may have looked at different points in their careers doing acrobatics, roller skating, or what not. Accompanying them would be a bevy of other performers and set pieces to round it out. Also, there were various projection screens in innovative places, as well as an LED screen that surrounded the theater, basketball arena style. It was truly a multi-format experience.
The show was notable in several ways beyond the remixed, and indeed, reborn, music. The sheer number of set pieces that came out of the ground or out of the sky was staggering, and the way they seamlessly lowered one and brought out another was truly impressive. The innovative projection screens divided the audience into four segments and had some very well done sequences. The complexity of the choreography must almost have taken a feat of engineering to pull off.
But I left overwhelmed (in a bad way), in the sense that there were often too many things going on. In many sets, my eyes were not drawn to one spot, and it felt over-the-top in that signature Vegas way. Also, I was blinded several times by lighting.
My favorite sets were the more minimal ones. By far my favorite was a set where they were doing Bubbles drawn from soap in the back of a grand piano, set to Strawberry Fields Forever. They had some powdery substance that was filling the bubbles, and everything had this reddish cast. The scene was intoxicating.
Another memorable scene was Come Together, which coupled a flashing spotlight to the percussion in a way that made a male dancer seem to leap out of the darkness each downbeat. Another was Tomorrow Never Knows which involved a giant parachute encompassing the stage and half of the audience.
Song choice was generally excellent - they hit some favorites of mine wouldn't necessarily make it onto a greatest hits album, such as Blackbird and For the Benefit of Mr. Kite. However, they put in the mediocre Lady Madonna, and inexplicably, Back in the U.S.S.R., which to me is one of the least interesting things they ever recorded. (other than that it was making fun of the Beach Boys)
This is a circus set entirely to Beatles music. The music had apparently been remixed and re-mashed-up from the master recordings by George Martin and sounded absolutely fantastic - if you are a Beatles fan, the music alone is worth the price of admission, as the CD recordings pale in comparison. Many of the vocals sounded double-tracked and the instrumentation was much richer.
Much of the set involved four male performers that looked vaguely like the Beatles may have looked at different points in their careers doing acrobatics, roller skating, or what not. Accompanying them would be a bevy of other performers and set pieces to round it out. Also, there were various projection screens in innovative places, as well as an LED screen that surrounded the theater, basketball arena style. It was truly a multi-format experience.
The show was notable in several ways beyond the remixed, and indeed, reborn, music. The sheer number of set pieces that came out of the ground or out of the sky was staggering, and the way they seamlessly lowered one and brought out another was truly impressive. The innovative projection screens divided the audience into four segments and had some very well done sequences. The complexity of the choreography must almost have taken a feat of engineering to pull off.
But I left overwhelmed (in a bad way), in the sense that there were often too many things going on. In many sets, my eyes were not drawn to one spot, and it felt over-the-top in that signature Vegas way. Also, I was blinded several times by lighting.
My favorite sets were the more minimal ones. By far my favorite was a set where they were doing Bubbles drawn from soap in the back of a grand piano, set to Strawberry Fields Forever. They had some powdery substance that was filling the bubbles, and everything had this reddish cast. The scene was intoxicating.
Another memorable scene was Come Together, which coupled a flashing spotlight to the percussion in a way that made a male dancer seem to leap out of the darkness each downbeat. Another was Tomorrow Never Knows which involved a giant parachute encompassing the stage and half of the audience.
Song choice was generally excellent - they hit some favorites of mine wouldn't necessarily make it onto a greatest hits album, such as Blackbird and For the Benefit of Mr. Kite. However, they put in the mediocre Lady Madonna, and inexplicably, Back in the U.S.S.R., which to me is one of the least interesting things they ever recorded. (other than that it was making fun of the Beach Boys)