Leaps of faith in las vegas
Cirque du Soleil’s O entertains with the confluence of water, money, and mythology.
Oh, man. People mill around the hotel in great roiling whorls, the lobby packed as densely as the glass anemones, an installation of the artist Dale Chihuly’s Fiori, straining from the ceiling. Eye the crowd. To brave this sea is to risk getting plowed onto the Bellagio’s Italian marble floor by waves of the Armani-clad, chattering in different tongues, traveling four and eight, sometimes ten abreast. Safety in numbers. Scusi, pardonnez moi, con permiso, gomen nasai, watchit, sorry. They break in sets that peak around noon and just before dinner. At most other hours visitors to Las Vegas eddy in casinos, the great flood tides corresponding solely with stomach pangs and show times. In this interior world with no sun, no moon, no natural light, it’s hunger that directs all movement, and appetites of every sort are constant and encouraged.
Las Vegas begs the question, what do I want? And what do I want now? Surely, for most of us it’s to beat the odds, to win a million bucks. Where else but in Las Vegas can one transcend at once reality and all laws of probability and physics: Your luck, this life, is not what you thought. It’s what you want! Get in the game, son. Take the plunge.
As for me, I’m only here to see what money can do with water. Hotelier Steve Wynn’s $1.6-million, Tuscan-style Bellagio, boasts a 1,200-jet outdoor fountain, a ten-acre replication of Italy’s Lake Como, and a $70-million theater with a 1.5 million gallon swimming pool for a stage floor. The latter is the venue for the $20-million Cirque du Soleil production, O, the Montréal-based company’s first-ever aquatic show.
Consider, for instance, Wynn’s computerized water fountain. It dances to Copland scores and Pavarotti arias and even has a sense of humor. Psst! starts the riff, come four familiar chords, as water jets jacked to heights of 240 feet shimmy to “Hey Big Spender,” the tune piped in on an intercom. The crowd gathered on the lake’s balustrade gasps with unabashed pleasure, like people do, say, when watching fireworks. “Do ya wanna have fun?” the fountain gushes. “I don’t pop my cork for every guy I see….”
The Cirque du Soleil’s O gets ink as the most expensive show in town, and thanks to Wynn’s opening-night turnout for the Bellagio, its premiere drew headliners like Martha Stewart, Michael Jordan, and the “million dollar mermaid,” Esther Williams. Franco Dragone, the show’s writer and director, describes O as an homage to the theater, “where humanity tries to understand itself.” O plays twice nightly, which is a problem, because I’m a water-lover not a gambler, and my watch says it’s not yet noon.
Psst! starts the riff, come four familiar chords, as water jets jacked to 240 feet shimmy to “Hey Big Spender,” the tune piped in on an intercom. “Do ya wanna have fun?” the fountain gushes. “I don’t pop my cork for every guy I see….”
Having neither talent nor interest in slots, craps, blackjack, roulette, video poker, keno, nor casinos in general, I’ve always considered myself Las Vegas-immune. It was ages ago that I was last in town, and then only at the bidding of a friend who convinced me to meet her and her pal, a billionaire arms dealer, for a soiree at the Sands Hotel. The soiree turned out to be a pretense; the arms dealer, seeking private entertainment. I told him and the bodyguards that I was soon to be married and slipped out on the next plane. Since then I’ve lost track of the so-called friend, the arms dealer has eluded charges of smuggling and conspiracy, I’ve been married and divorced, and the Sands has been leveled to dust.
All of this I had forgotten; all of this comes flooding back. Here I am, and, by strange coincidence, engaged to be married again. So, what do I want? More to the point, what do I want now?
I venture out onto a shopping concourse to snack at a caviar bar where golden imperial goes for $280 an ounce, and where, the bartender tells me, the Cirque du Soleil performers hang out on their down time. Within strolling distance is the saltwater aquarium that spews live flames on the hour; out of it rises a talking Neptune robot. The nearby IMAX simulator ride is also a tribute to the deep. It hooks you with a dare: “Only YOU can save the Lost City of Atlantis!” My fiancé, a master of computer games, would adore this thing: You don a helmet with 14,000-watt speakers and a special effects visor, then strap yourself in for the ride. The seats barely move, but dodging 3-D evils, I’m screaming right along with the 220-pound linebacker and 12-year-old flanking me. It’s a happily-ever-after deal: Cyberdolphins escort you to the Promised Land, swimming alongside you through—what else?—a golden ring.
OK, I admit. What I want is the happily-ever-after deal—just like the other 200,000 souls who, braving the odds to stake their hearts on marriage, wed in Las Vegas every year. En route to the Cirque theater I test my luck, upping a jackpot to $25,000,008 in less than a minute. Who was it that deemed a second marriage “the triumph of hope over experience”? Ah yes, the same wise guy who said, “It is better to live rich than to die rich.”
I queue up for O thinking zip, goose egg, what you come up with when you try to beat the house. The theater program offers this cryptic opener: “Travel far enough away, my friend, and you’ll discover something of great beauty: your self.” I haven’t a clue what that means, but the show’s name is said to be a phonetic play on the French eau for “water.” A play on the French, indeed: The Story of O, the “big O”…O is a one-ring circus. O is the chemical symbol for oxygen.
Inside the theater, the air is faintly humid. Tinged with bromine and incense, it stirs childhood memories of swimming lessons and midnight mass at Catholic churches. It’s built in the style of a 14th-century European opera house, but concessionaires sell soda pop and popcorn alongside lattes and biscotti. “Take your picture as a souvenir?” asks an usher in a harlequin-print morning coat.
Soon after I take my seat, the sound of dripping water starts to bounce off the walls, and two clowns appear carrying buckets and umbrellas. They make bungled attempts to shield us, the audience, from the “leaking” ceiling 120 feet above, but the umbrellas they proffer are holey like Swiss cheese.
This time the message is clear: We’re all in this together. Don’t think for a minute you’re not going to get soaked. A reference to Las Vegas? Or life in general? While we giggle and titter, an apparition swirls down from the chandelier: Rotating impossibly in every direction floats a lovely trapeze artist. O’s lilting score, by composer Benoit Jutras and performed by a ten-piece orchestra, seeps gently into my psyche. With that, the lights go down and the curtain sweeps back to reveal a glimmering pool that spans the floor of the 13,500-square foot stage.
I brace myself for the classic adventure tale to unfold in which an impenetrable abyss, the kind that Indiana Jones might dangle over by a rope, symbolizes every unknown terror, certain death, the ultimate void. For the next hour and half, O slyly turns this notion on its macho head. Still, in the adventure tradition, we meet The Hero, a Sicilian kid eager to embrace experience, and The Mentor, a jaded veteran of classical theater. Together they seem to embark on otherworldly escapades through which they hope to find enlightenment and save each other’s souls. Happily, that’s the extent of the plot. For this is the circus, which has less to do with tidy story than acts of dazzling magic and chaotic daredevilry.
Twin trapeze artists mirror each other’s movements with feet-to-feet catches, creating reflections of each other above their reflections in the pool. Vestment-clad cardinals ride huge carousel horses around the twins. A pod of amphibious acrobats have a rave on an island that has surfaced in the middle of the pool while androgynous creatures swathed in sequins and fishnet shoot out of the water and do backflips off the pool ledge. A dominatrix in hip boots walks on water, a clown attempts his own drowning with a boulder-turned-life preserver, and flying sailors steer a ship that plies air.
Eventually the pool disappears. And later, it reappears, after which I suspend all disbelief and roll with the whole abracadabra thing: Jugglers in lavalavas twirl torches while a man reading the newspaper calmly catches on fire. Clowns atop an iceberg drop an anchor that sinks so deep it falls from the sky. Zebralike creatures flee a thundershower, tails on their heads. Dreadlocked mermaids descend invisible escalators to a seafloor that rises up and beaches scuba divers. And the cardinals flaunt black garter belts while scaling an invisible stairway to heaven.
What really takes me for a loop, though, are the weddings scenes.
Giddy brides and grooms troop out en masse to canoodle at the water’s edge. Finally one smitten soul takes the plunge, lives to tell the tale, and the rest follow. The grooms drop trou, the brides shed their veils. Launching themselves from swings in their underwear, they freeze above the water for split seconds before they fall, by turns ecstatic and terrified. Naturally they all survive—and make the notion of marriage look like a cakewalk.
I know better, of course, a skepticism born of experience and a backstage and underwater tour of the show. Producing the wedding scenes and the rest of O’s acts is akin to what led to “Let the games begin!” in Ben Hur.
Four years in the making, O presented challenges in everything from engineering to staging. For starters, the pool requires seven hydraulic lifts to give the appearance that it’s rising and falling. A computerized conveyor system, the “telepherique,” operates 60 feet above the pool, moving scenery, props, and performers on and off the set. The cardinals’ carousel horses come equipped with motors and propellers. Video cameras monitor the action underwater, and a communications console oversees the underwater radio channels. A dozen scuba divers stand by to ensure the performers’ safety underwater, hauling them offstage, stuffing regulators in their mouths between onstage pool exits and entrances. Two dive safety officers with built-in microphones communicate with stage personnel. Eighteen underwater breathing stations supply air to submerged performers awaiting cues. Some acts submerge up to 50 performers for a single scene. And for the finale? The entire cast sinks with a grand piano.
Aquatics director Alan Goldberg and his team trained all but 16 of the 75 performers and a crew of 60 in scuba techniques. With no ocean within 200 miles, certification took place over three days amid the catfish and crappie of nearby Lake Mead, the largest artificial lake in the United States. Among the holdouts, the five contortionists from Mongolia at least learned to swim.
“It was like a mass baptism,” says Goldberg, who enjoyed a career as a lion tamer until a tiger put him in a wheelchair for six months. Joining O, he put such death-defying acts behind him.
As for the technical end of my tour, it’s way over my head and I wish my fiancé were here. He could make fine sense of the computer wizardry, hydroelectric circuitry, sand-filtration system, Pool Perfect pH balancer, and backup power systems. I bow out to talk with some of the performers. While they hail from 16 countries, they speak of O in terms that sound like global maxims for art, for life, for love.
American high diver and gymnast Kimm Miller was considering a switch to Hollywood stunts when she landed her gig with the Cirque. She plays a femme fatale bride who lures a hapless fellow up a 60-foot ladder to the high-dive. “I didn’t realize when I signed on for O that we would train in so many disciplines: swing diving, dance class, scuba diving, acting,” she says. “In other types of shows, you have a script; all you have to do is learn it. But Cirque shows are built entirely from personality, and you have no idea what anybody wants. You have to pull a lot more from yourself. I thought, ‘Oh, my God…’”
Canadian diver and gymnast Matthieu LaPlante dropped out of show business so he could have “more of a life,” but changed his tune while working construction and washing dishes. His roles include one of the catapulting bridegrooms. “Sometimes because of the bubbles you can’t see anything at all,” he says. “You have to have trust in the people you’re working with.” LaPlante wears contacts; so far, he’s lost 38 lenses.
Thamar Christian Maarteen Vincent, a dancer and vocalist from Holland, plays Le Travesti, the dominatrix who coos, hisses, and walks on water. “I do birds, Bruce Lee, James Brown, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, sometimes a little funk,” he says. “I don’t do pirouettes, though, because the stage has a rubber floor and my boots are rubber, too. Dancing in the water I slipped one time, but I turned it into a bird jump.”
You have to pull a lot more from yourself. You have to have trust. If you slip in a puddle, turn it into a jump….
I watch the show a second time and it starts to sink in. Fire doesn’t always burn. Earth’s gravity won’t necessarily hold you down. Water can save your life or drown you.
And then Kimm Miller, the vamping bride, is climbing a 60-foot ladder to the high-dive, up, up, up, while the water beckons below. She find her footing, holds her position, fills her lungs, and lets herself fall—just like that—and I forget about the Bellagio and the lost city of Atlantis and the Pool Perfect and the safety divers and the power systems. I hold my breath, clasp my sweaty hands, and fall with her. •
Aqua Magazine
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
