Levi Jet - Travis Michael Holder

Costume designer Philippe Guillotel 

and "Teddy Boy" Joanthan Strong

Make-up designer Nathalie Gagne and Hassan El Hajjami preparing to become The Walrus

In the backstage practice space in the bowels of the Mirage that once housed Siegfried and Roy’s infamous tigers before and after performances, complete with ominous scratch marks remaining along the captives’ hallway path and the remnants of the bolts that once fastened their cages in place still visible on the walls, acrobats now soar to the high ceiling of the room on long vertical ropes while rehearsing for the much-anticipated opening night of Cirque du Soleil’s fifth and latest permanent Las Vegas attraction, The Beatles’ LOVE.

Unlike those overly trained and obviously unhappy white-striped beasts of yore, helpless to say whether they wanted to be here or not all those years, these newly arrived airborne human artisans have been rehearsing for months—and not just to learn how to soar like Lucy in the Sky. In keeping with their “Here Comes the Sun” number, 21st in the show’s 28-songcycle running order, these performers have honored a song written when The Beatles were into their metaphysical-transcendental stage by fiercely researching and diligently studying a mix of yoga techniques and Eastern Indian dance. Whether or not they tried a couple of tabs of Clear Light they aren’t saying.

Let’s just say commitment here among the 62 castmembers, as well as the multitude of backstage artists and technicians pushing the LOVE payroll to about 200, is a given. Bowing at every turn to the Fab Four’s groundbreaking sound, Cirque du Soleil and MGM-Mirage have joined forces with Apple Corp Ltd. to stage a magical mystery tour all their own, miraculously engineering new life into some of the 20th century’s most enduring music. In the process, they have shaped a new musical revolution of sorts by bringing together the brilliance of the most imaginative and successful composers of our time with the most innovative troupe of performance artists working anywhere today.

Cirque du Soleil has singlehandedly reinvented this bizarre town over the past dozen years or so since Mystere took the infamous desert oasis by storm (Wayne Newton has never been the same), and now LOVE now joins Mystere, KA, Zumanity and “O” on the roster of permanent Cirque shows dominating and selling out months in advance along the Vegas Strip. As much as I have written in glowing, suitably mesmeric phrases about the Cirque over the past years, may I say nothing—nothing—could equal this newest adventure. Seeing LOVE performed is, without a shadow of a doubt, a once in a lifetime experience, even for a worshipful, chronic and crusty-eyed old professional Cirque du Soleil groupie like me.

Opening festivities of this monumental attraction were overshadowed by the presence of remaining band members Paul McCartney (who answered all questions rather dourly and barely venturing past one syllable, perhaps understandable considering recent events in his personal life) and Ringo Starr, as well as Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, but perhaps the most incredible part of my week in Vegas to cover the event was meeting and talking to Sir George Martin, the octogenarian original producer of all The Beatles’ albums and co-musical director of LOVE with his son Giles. Working for the last two years on this project, the legendary Sir George admitted, was “thrilling” even for him. Not content with creating a “retrospective or tribute show,” the Martins insisted instead on bringing to each of the 2,013 audience members the personal experience of being in a small recording studio listening to the music for the first time.

In their sound studio high above the stage Sir George calls an “exact replica of Abbey Road Studios… so much so we felt like laboratory hamsters whenever we moved something,” the Martins practice their signature sorcery. “Our mission was to try and achieve the same intimacy we get when listening to the master tapes at the studio,” Sir George explained. “The songs sound so alive. A lot of people listen to The Beatles in a conventional way—radio, MP3 player or car, for example—but never in such a space as this.”

Creating a kind of directional panoramic mode in the theatre-in-the-round by embedding two speakers in the back of every seat, the sounds of LOVE engulf and envelope the audience, achieving, as Sir George believes, “a real sense of drama with the music, [making] the audience feel as though they are actually in the room with the band.” This is made more unique since the master tapes utilized were not “designed for a record,” not mined from the old classic albums or concert performances, but cut during the boys’ stints in the studio making small promotional films. Often featuring improvised quips as they goofed off and joked casually with one another, the final mix offers, as Sir George reasoned to me with infectious, childlike enthusiasm, “such an immediate sound… not ‘muffly’ like with so many shows in rooms this size.”

Unlike previous Cirque du Soleil productions, LOVE is more a celebration of the era in which The Beatles soared, and the designers and creators have done everything in their power (and they have a lot of resources from which to draw) to recall that global phenomenon known as Beatlemania. Beginning with real live Nowhere Men shuffling alone onto the stage to reluctantly visit a modest “Nowhere Land,” four scrim-obscured sides of the 360-degree experience soon open grandly into a brave new world. Acrobats dressed as sailors scale ropes leading from a deep pit around the stage to the rigging high above, twirling around the dismal scene of WWII-torn Liverpool, the exact time when John Lennon was born during the last Blitz. As brick walls burst and four small mop-topped children cower in their beds, the chillingly omniscient voices of The Beatles fill the enormous space to harmonize their glorious a cappella classic tune “Because.”

Prop designer Patricia Ruel

 

Sir George Martin and Giles Martin 

in their mini-Abbey Road studio

Backstage - Party pictures by 

Travis Michael Holder

All the Beatles’ familiar invented characters are present onstage, including Eleonor Rigby, Father McKenzie, Sgt. Pepper, Lady Madonna, Mr. Kite, and the Walrus, as the chronology of The Beatles’ music journeys from the early eager goofy enthusiasm, through the drug and meditation eras, and on to a spectacular finale of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” The 90-minute ride is like nothing anyone has ever seen before, thanks to the creators’ ability to make it all alternately imposing yet surprisingly intimate. Populated not only with typical Cirque aerialists and gymnasts (ranging in age from 9 to 72) but with street performers, ballet artists, hip-hoppers, tap and break dancers—some pulled right off the curb who’ve never even been in a stage show before—there could not be a greater or more devoted homage to the colossal talents of The Beatles than LOVE.

 Theatre and set designer Jean Rabesse was given a totally blank blueprint schematic of the former Siegfried and Roy stage and told to do whatever he wanted—a designer’s dream. Like the Martins, Rabesse wanted to go “inside the universe of the 60s from the lobby on” and thought the idea of creating a black box recording studio feeling “was a natural to put the audience in the studio with the band.”

A lot of what he created was conjured in computerized 3-D: “Other shows work with models and drawings,” he explained, “but this one had to be seen as a P.O.V. from every seat and all angles.” This result, he says, is one needs to come back “four to 10 times to see everything,” bringing a hint of the original three-ring roots of Cirque du Soleil to mind—again, thankfully, without imprisoning and domesticating wild animals.

Augmenting the inspiration of LOVE’s conceptual creator Guy Laliberte, who first conjured the idea for the production while hanging with his bud, the late-great Saint George (Harrison) himself, are incredible video projections fabricated by Francis Laporte, who admitted to me behind the scenes in his own studio that a scant two years ago he never would have had the tools to achieve the heights of visual wonder he did with LOVE.

Using mostly unearthed promotional films featuring The Beatles at their most relaxed, his aim was to be “as timeless as possible.” This is apparent in a spectacular mounting of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” as projected letters of the alphabet float down across the screens or are projected through reams of paper dropped down onto the audience from above. “We wanted the feeling of words falling,” says Laporte. “Like a dream falling apart.”

Also contributing to the splendor that is LOVE are director-writer Dominic Champagne, concept creator Gilles Ste-Croix, creation director Chantal Tremblay, puppet designer Michael Curry (designer of the creatures of KA and Lion King on Broadway), and choreographers Hansel Cereza and Dave St-Pierre. There are also 365 fanciful costumes designed by Philippe Guillotel, colorful make-up by Nathalie Gagne (who’s invented faces for every Cirque show since the beginning), lighting by Yves Aucoin, sound by Jonathan Deans, and acid-dream props by KA’s Patricia Ruhl.

Asked about the inclusion of four children depicted without faces wearing plastic Beatles mob-headed helmets reminiscent of Devo, director-writer Champagne’s ability to conjure a personal connection with the bandmembers becomes apparent. “Remember, John Lennon was the most famous man on the planet after Jesus Christ back then,” he explains. The Beatles were as puzzled by their own fame and rampant Beatlemania as anyone else, making them feel almost invisible within the claustrophobic confines of their own celebrity.

This emphasis is also visible in the presence of one lost Chaplin-like Nowhere Man (played brilliantly by the Netherlands’ Goos Meeuwsen), whose presence is meant to reflect the loss of freedom and personal space Lennon was experiencing when he called himself a ‘nowhere man.’ “You know, for any of us,” says Champagne with a grin, “all we need is love.”

The scariest thing for me sitting among the first people to see LOVE was the audience dotted with ancient gray and white heads reminiscent of a group of subscribers gathered for opening night of some old musical warhorse at La Mirada Civic. My immediate thought, as the walls themselves came alive with the sound of Beatles’ music cranked to full volume, was that the usual Vegas audiences might not appreciate the decibel level.

Wearing what Rita Rudner calls clothes that make her want to go up to them and say, “Excuse me, but what are you thinking?,” these are the people who leave Mamma Mia at the Mandalay Bay with their foot-long margaritas in hand as soon as the musical director hits the downbeat. But no, not this time. The minute the sounds of John, Paul, Ringo and John’s vocals filled the huge auditorium, all those gray and white heads came alive, bopping and weaving like psychedelized flower children just as we did 40 years ago. Those ancient heads, you see, were my contemporaries, something that made me want to go back to my suite, melt into the pillowtop mattress and pull the covers over my own rapidly graying head.

But after dancing the night away at the wonderful party after the performance, toe-to-toe with the performers and artisans of LOVE break dancing (them, not me) til nearly dawn, I realized once again what a remarkable impact my generation has made on the world in general and the future of music in particular. As young people continually quiz me about my days touring in Hair, booking the Troubadour in its artistic heyday, or working for Jim Morrison and The Doors, their adoration for “our” era is obvious, not like when we Boomers were kids, listening with moderately curious interest to the our parents wax nostalgic about their youth swinging to Tommy Dorsey or listening to hit 45s from Pattie Page and Rosie Clooney warbling about the cost of doggies in the friggin’ window.

See, there was nothing wrong with those simpler days that also bravely led the way to our own historic musical revolution, but it was nothing like what we let ourselves accomplish in the late 60s and early 70s (before disco strip-mined the experience), bringing with us sounds that laid the groundwork for the unstoppable musical freedom of today.

For all those younguns’ who worship our Boomer-years youth, you should; there was nothing like it for those of us who somehow managed to survive it. And nowhere—nowhere—will you guys be able to absorb the experience better than by heading to the Mirage to let your mind soar and your body groove to the wonder of The Beatles as though discovering them for the first time, so lovingly and reverently recreated and celebrated in LOVE, simply the best Cirque du Soleil production yet.

Tickets for LOVE are available at The Mirage or any MGM-Mirage box office in Vegas, online at www.mirage.com, or by calling (800) 963-9634. (July 2006)

Let’s face it: in the shadow of the film industry, it’s never been easy for the live arts to make any visible headway in LA. I’ve been writing about theatre here for nearly two decades and the state of our theatrical arts is just about as dismal as it was when I began, with one obvious exception: the prolific nature of the beast these days in spite of audiences sometimes consisting of 12 comped friends of the cast. Today, theatre artists and companies are still struggling to survive, but now there are about 300 times the amount of people trying to make it work and, despite all their good intentions in doing so, further diluting the audience base. It’s beginning to feel as though my Don Quixote days are just about over.

An even harder thing to champion in LA is cabaret, which is faced with about the same amount of community apathy as it was 20 years ago. The Gardenia is still around, but Hollywood Roosevelt’s historic Cinegrill is now gone, as is the west coast version of Michael Feinstein’s highly successful New York nightclub which took over the Cinegrill’s space briefly before the whole thing turned back into a laundry room. Is the problem that we’re too comfortable in our lifestyle? Does it take postage stamp-sized apartments to force New Yorkers out to clubs and theatres in the evening? Or is it the fact that here we can’t step out onto the curb and grab a cab home after a few dirty gin martinis?

Someone brave is now bucking the odds and no one is more up to the challenge than hardworking local publicist Michael Sterling, who this month began a partnership with Matt Epstein, new owner of Vitello’s Restaurant in Studio City (yes, Virginia, that Vitello’s) to open a sleek new supper club called Sterling’s Upstairs. Promising to bring the “best of Broadway, cabaret and nightclub artists,” the room is a lifetime dream of Sterling, who represented such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor, David Copperfield and Joan Collins, as well as national theatre and arena tours, local theatre productions, Emmy Award-winning TV specials, celebrity books and albums. He is also a critically-acclaimed director and producer of musical theatre throughout the Southland.

Inspiration for Sterling’s dream of running a supper club came from a late and much-missed mutual friend. “I was first introduced to music as a very young child by listening to recordings of Rosemary Clooney,” he admits. “As fate had it, years later, I ended up meeting Rosemary at her home and we became instant friends. My first job in the music business was road managing Rosemary on an extensive tour of the United States, but at a time when her career had reached an all time low and, unbeknownst to me, Rosemary was heading into an emotional, nervous breakdown which happened shortly after the tour ended.

“Nonetheless, we remained lifelong friends and I was privileged to witness her career soar to the top once again until her passing in 2002. During the earlier years of our relationship, I also became friendly with Michael Feinstein who worked with Rosemary in intimate nightclubs throughout the country as she regained her health and a resurgence in her career.” 

Sterling continues: “As one of the most legendary and prolific vocal interpreters of the Great American Songbook, it was not only Rosemary’s support of me to pursue my dreams, but her educating me to American standards by such composers as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jule Styne, Johnny Mercer, Marilyn and Alan Bergman and many others. That will emerge onstage by a variety of artists at Sterling’s Upstairs.”

Adding a significant amount of class and a fair amount of spunk to the club will be the hands-on participation of cabaret and musical theatre giant Joan Ryan, longtime client of Sterling who’s onboard as artist-in-residence. In addition to her celebrated extended starring role as Judy Denmark/Ginger DelMarco in the LA premiere of Ruthless! at the Canon, my beloved friend Joan has also starred in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Nunsense II, Angry Housewives, Nite Club Confidential, Suds, Duets for Five, Elegies: Stories from the Quilt, Hidden Broadway, Leonard Bernstein’s MASS, and the west coast premiere of Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle. Soap fans will recognize her longtime role on The Young and the Restless and Joan’s heralded self-titled CD continues to be a bestseller throughout the country.

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I don’t know if you realized it or not, but if there are any loyal regular readers of mine out there, you almost lost me. You might have noticed that my long-running and long-winded writing has been absent from the website for a while, partially due to some fairly hairy health issues, partly because I’ve spent a total of almost four months out of town since January shooting the film version of my first play, Surprise Surprise, then chilling in a beachfront hotel in Ventura while playing Cheswick in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Rubicon. But more than all that (when have I ever before taken a break from writing about theatre when I was working?), the biggest problem for me was just plain discouragement.

Simply, I was burned out. I recognized after my unusual Time Out—a few weeks spent not fighting frantically to make my weekly and monthly deadlines for reviews and articles in six different publications—that writing about and championing theatre in our Industry-obsessed town suddenly seemed like a fantasy outlet for me, something that made me feel as though I’m accomplishing and contributing something vaguely fulfilling to the dream of a successful and respected theatre community in Lost Angeles.

I looked at things around me with less rose-tinted lenses during my self-imposed exile and began to feel completely useless and ineffectual. I’ve spent the last 19 years writing diligently about LA theatre (I saw and wrote about 231 shows in 2005, 209 of them in LA) and changed nothing. It’s the same tired old story: nobody gives a crap about live theatre here and it’s still just as tough as ever for theatre artists and companies to stay afloat and win a loyal audience as it was when I got here from New York in 1853 or whenever it was. Asking my friend Olivia Honegger, who moved to the Big Apple to produce and direct several years ago after trying valiantly to do the same in LA, what the main difference was between doing small theatre in both cities. “In New York,” she said, “I don’t know everyone in the audience.” Why, some people even buy tickets there!

Then came the nearly final blow when I heard that the groundbreaking and dearly adored evidEnce Room would be closing its doors—after an award-winning SRO season crystallizing their knockout 11-year history where compromise was just simply not in their vocabulary as they crashed through the barriers of creating art. After the loss of treasured spaces housing the Open Fist and West Coast Ensemble, the closing of the Tiffany and the Court, the demolition of the Canon, and the typically ruthless takeover of the Ivy Substation by Tim Robbins and his Actors Gang from Circle X and a coalition of six other homeless theatre companies, I thought: I’m sorta done with writing about theatre for now—or in need of a long, long hiatus.

The demise of the evidEnce Room that sent its unstoppable artistic director Bart DeLorenzo and his uniquely gifted troupe packing from the glorious former warehouse space where walls opened, audience configurations changed, the lobby became a hangout and a second playing space, and Ken Roht brought a cast of over 50 each year to carry on brilliantly in his 99-Cent Store Shows, has been a terrible blow to anyone who believes theatre can be more than the 83rd revival of My Fair Lady and The Odd Couple. I had the special privilege of working there twice, playing Quentin in Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings with the lobby turned into a seedy 1970s coastal bar (winning LA Weekly Award nominations for me, John Fleck and Wendy Johnson) and as two characters—the rednecked Sheriff Holder and the slimy porn-king Marty Panderman—in Michael Sargent’s raucously funny American Nympho, a third of the huge counterculture hit living comic book serial The Strip which played late nights each Saturday at 11pm for most of one year and then was revived again this last spring. With new scripts created by Sargent, Justin Tanner and Patricia Scanlon each week and famous guest stars chompin’ at the bit to join us, it was a glorious time. Why, Michael even wrote in a part for my friend Chris Carmack as my mentally-vacant deputy, getting the future star of The O.C. and Broadway’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane to do a strip down to a leopard-skinned thong, a momentous occasion.

So what does the courageous evidEnce Room choose to present as their final production in their wonderful home of the last six years? Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, of course dealing with a family who must leave their cherished home due to financial ruin. As Bart explains, “Events turned very quickly here. We had just closed our most successful season when the company and the landlords found ourselves in the middle of an irreconcilable lease dispute. By consent and with respect, the landlords generously allowed the theatre to carry out our planned spring production, which poetically and coincidentally presents a story of displacement.”

 

The Cherry Orchard was written in 1903 when debilitating illness surely made Chekhov, a practicing physician, realize it would be his last play. Though heartbreaking, it is also oddly and sweetly hilarious at times, as Liubov Ranyevskaya (here played on one of the year’s most remarkable turns by Maria O’Brien) refuses to realize the gravity of her situation until the workers arrive to chop down her beloved cherry trees, unable to even listen to Lopakhin (ER favorite Don Oscar Smith in his finest performance yet) as he suggests subdividing the orchard into vacation properties, the sale of which could potentially save the house itself. 

 

“Forgive me,” she says, taking a break from talking through Lopakhin’s speech while gobbling food and fine wine with her brother Gayev (Tom Fitzpatrick), “but subdivided leisure homes? It’s all so hopelessly vulgar!”

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This is an indelible mounting of The Cherry Orchard, made even more bittersweet than ever as characters turn their eyes to the room and mourn viewing “these walls, these windows for the last time.” Stacked cardboard moving boxes fill the lobby and haunt the back of the stage, eventually tossed out the evidEnce Room’s massive back doors behind the stage into the alley below as the family finally readies to move out. 

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It is a production dominated by the unique signature style Bart DeLorenzo has become known to adopt, featuring magical performances throughout by ER-ers past, including O’Brien, Smith and Fitzgerald, the amazing Leo Marks, Lauren Campedelli and Colleen Kane, not to mention two young people quickly becoming my symbol of hope for the LA theatre scene, Ryan Templeton and Michael Cassady (who I’m proud to say I brought to Bart and the ER).

In contrast, new to the company but another kind of symbol, that of the durability of the arts, is veteran actor Lee Kissman, offering a delicately nuanced and tragic performance as the aged servant Firs.

Says Bart: “When I was planning rehearsals, I thought The Cherry Orchard was a story of loss, of things ending. Through the process, I have come to understand that the play is more accurately about change. Difficult, complicated change… with no psychoanalyst needed to be consulted to point out the source of that perspective shift. I hope our audience will forgive a little more indulgence than usual as we perhaps incorporate our own experience of change into this performance.”

Forgive you? I celebrate you. Watching Bart’s typically heroic off-centered spin on the classic Cherry Orchard unfold gave me a new resolve to continue chasing those friggin’ windmills of the theatrical arts in Los Angeles no matter how much my efforts seem futile on occasion. Better that than looking back, as one of Chekhov’s most autobiographical characters muses in his final great play, and feel as though “life has come and gone and I’ve never lived.” It’s the nature of art to be ephemeral and, despite its inequities and cruelties as a passion or a profession, despite feeling most of the time like Lopakhin, trying to say something but “no one ever listens,” I guess the nature of the true artist must be nomadic. Thanks to Bart, I’m writing again—and I’m sure he and his company of astonishing artists will resurface too before you know it.  (June-2006)
Photo 1: John Zalewski

Photo 2: Mike Jansen