All you need is ‘Love’ (and some great songs)
30 June 2006

Cirque does Sargeant Pepper

Apple Corps Ltd, the company created in 1967 to oversee the business interests of The Beatles, isn’t known for its open-mindedness. The London-based organization –supervised by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison – has generally met requests for permission to use the iconic band’s recordings on stage and screen over the years with a resounding no, and waged legal battles against everyone from EMI to Apple Computer in its ardent protection of The Beatles’ good name.

So when a press release arrived in my inbox a few months ago announcing a “joint artistic venture” between Apple Corps and Cirque du Soleil, I was puzzled. That the Beatles’ protectorate had, for the first time ever, authorized the use of the band’s recordings in a theatrical setting was remarkable enough. But to choose to make cultural history with Cirque du Soleil, a company whose own musical legacy can at best be described as watered-down Enya, and at worst – to borrow a phrase of John Rockwell’s in a recent story about the Canadian conglomerate in The New York Times -- “the sort of music mimes would make if mimes made music,” seemed too bizarre to be true. I had to witness this odd alliance for myself.

I left the custom-built 2013-seat theatre at The Mirage Resort in Las Vegas a couple of evenings ago as surprised as I had been the last time I staggered out of a Cirque du Soleil performance. That was late last year, when the deeply imaginative, jubilant acrobatics in the touring production Corteo, ended up undermining my misgivings about the formulaic, spectacle-heavy Cirque shows I’d previously seen, not to mention the company’s transformation of circus – that most anarchic and freewheeling of art forms – into a multi-million-dollar business. Founded in 1984 by Quebec native Guy Laliberté -- who may be the world's only billionaire combination stilt walker, accordion player, and fire eater – the privately-held company boasts six permanent productions in Las Vegas and Disney World, Orlando, seven international touring shows, successful music, film, and merchandizing spin-offs, and US $500 million in annual revenues. On this occasion, however, it wasn’t physical endeavor that made me fight an impulse to run away that very night to join the Cirque; it was the music.

Indeed, if Love, Cirque du Soleil and Apple Corps’ US $150 million new co-production inspired by the work of The Beatles, gives us anything to twist and shout about, it’s the soundtrack. Created by longtime Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his 36-year-old son Giles, (who has worked with the likes of Elvis Costello and Kate Bush,) Love’s music is an immersive, 90-minute-long audio collage weaving together 29 Beatles songs with more than a hundred additional musical snippets and outtakes mined from the group’s session tapes.

The music is not only intoxicating for the dexterity with which it has been pieced together, but for the pristine quality of its sound. In addition to being forged from the group’s original unmixed recordings rather than the later productions upon which all existing Beatles CDs and LPs were subsequently based, the show’s score is further enhanced by the circular auditorium’s 6,000-plus speakers, including one speaker implanted in every seat. As a result, Love gives us The Fab Four as they have never been heard before. You can literally hear the guitar strings squeaking in the introduction to “Blackbird” and pick out the separate string parts in “Eleanor Rigby;” the close a cappella harmonies in “Because” sound wildly crunchy; meanwhile the drum riff in “Come Together” seems more haunting than ever.

Evidently, a great deal of love has gone into creating this homage to pop culture’s most famous foursome. The collaborators manage to avoid cliché. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’ for example, is performed by a single female aerialist against a nighttime backdrop of tiny white lights, rather than being the acid-inspired, psychedelic daydream that one would expect. Similarly, vast, inky silhouettes of Paul, John, George, and Ringo on high-definition screens allude loosely to the band members without being overtly biographical. (The recent musical Lennon essayed the same approach with less success.) Some of the numbers, like the wonderfully loopy, phantasmagoric interpretation of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” with its freak-show characters and Victorian traveling sideshow aesthetic, and the luminescent underwater staging of “Octopus’s Garden,” even seem like they were composed with Cirque du Soleil in mind.

Yet for all its technical wizardry and gorgeous visual effects, Love feels curiously unfulfilling. Besides a thrilling sequence featuring four yeti-boot-clad roller-bladers whizzing up and down skate ramps to “Help!” and a quirky interpretation of “Blackbird” in which an avuncular gentleman dressed in white tries to reason with a quartet of disheveled, recalcitrant birds, Love gives us very little in the way of memorable acrobatics or clowning. The show’s gymnastic content mostly involves performers bouncing up and down on bungee-chords or gliding aimlessly above the stage in harnesses. Love actually features more dance routines than gymnastics, but the 60s-rock-concert-style choreography soon becomes as repetitive as the intermittent on-stage appearances of the VW Beetle, one of the production’s main motifs. Ultimately – and to the slight detriment of the production -- the stars of Love are not the talented yet sadly under-utilized performers, but the songs.

Although the show marks a new era in the dissemination of The Beatles’ music, Apple Corps might just have the last laugh. As I gazed up at the group members’ giant, gyrating screen shadows, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the iTunes advertising campaign. Could this be a covert form of revenge for the loss of the recent high-profile lawsuit over the Apple logo against iTunes’ creator? I wonder if Steve Jobs will sue.

www.cirquedusoleil.com