I’m With Ringo: A Baby Boomer goes to review a show on the Vegas trip and realizes how important the Beatles music has been in his life.

By Alex Ben Block

Beatles get a little Love from Cirque du Soleil

LAS VEGAS (HOLLYWOOD TODAY) – 11/3/09 — My love affair with the Beatles music began in the Sixties and is still going strong. Their songs have turned out to be oracles of a new age in which music was all that mattered. When the British invasion hit America in the early 1960s I immediately surrendered. They have been a key part of the soundtrack of my life ever since.

The Fab Four got me again last Friday night when I was blown away by the Cirque du Soleil’s multimedia stage and musical extravaganza “Love” at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. They have taken the Beatles music and matched it to the zany, creative genius of Cirque du Soleil (French for “Circus of the Sun).” The result is a delight of bouncing, flying madness set to the soundtrack of the legendary British band, creating  near sensory overload and a unique form of entertainment.

Today in the U.S. Asia, Europe and the Middle East, Cirque offers a multi-media experience that crosses theater and a circus with the pacing of a shoot em up western,  as might be conceived by the Marx brothers on steroids. The environment is replete with huge video screens exploding with stunning images in perfect sync with the flow of history, life, acrobats, jugglers, stilt walkers, dancers, magicians, bizarre iconic images, all flashing, dashing and spinning history as seen through Alice’s looking glass. The five dozen performers deliver their magic and disappear leaving the viewer almost breathless.

It’s a kind of Beatles opera, crossed with the circus, Olympic gymnastics, side show freaks, beautiful women, children, repurposed VW bugs, trampoline performers, roller skate hot shots and costumed characters to create an interactive pop art happening right in front of your eyes. The audience around me in the multi deck theater at the Mirage was as caught up in Beatlemania as I was, especially when a massive white silk sheet, the kind used for parachutes, was draped in flowing white yards of material  over our heads making us part of the show for those few moments.

Most dazzling to me was the kamikaze team of roller skaters in furry white boots and helmets flying onto and over graded barriers, hurling through the air, doing impossible gravity defying loops, often inches from one another, with amazing precision delivered at breakneck speed, all without a net and usually accompanied by performers with a smile. This was clearly dangerous stuff but they all looked like they had just arrived at the best party ever. Maybe it was for them. A producer wrote in a show diary that the performers loved being part of the shows (there are half a dozen touring companies, as well as shows in fixed locations on almost every continent with a sizable city).

For “Love,” the frantic narrative the experience is enriched because the music is from the original  soundtrack of The Beatles as recorded in the 1960s at their Abbey Road studio in the U.K. under the guidance of master producer George Martin. A cast of 60 international artists performs in a specially designed auditorium with panoramic sound and hi tech video visuals on massive screens that surround the upper reaches of the arena.

Above it all floating on the giant screens were the images of the Fab Four, the lads from Liverpool, together and separately. They were interspliced with offbeat, inventive, whimsical, amusing, cheeky gags and imagery as the high speed circus rolled along, things and people dropping from above and rising from below. One memorable bit involved building a whole town square out of bricks and then demolishing it in a representation of the World War II bombing of England,  before sweeping it below stage into a literal dustbin of history, all in a mad scramble paced like the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.” A dreamlike sequence to “Yesterday” is soon followed by blowing bubbles to “Strawberry Fields Forever” as lights blinked all around the room like a million stars on an incredibly clear night in the desert and the war faded and post-war prosperity brought a new economic boom.

The Beatles story is well known but I had to do a little research to find out how “Love” came about and how it was viewed by the surviving Beatles, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, as well as the families of martyred John Lennon and the late, great thinking man’s Beatle George Harrison, musician and extraordinary businessman in his day.

It was Harrison, before his death, who became friends with Cirque founder Guy Laliberté, which led to the creations of this particular show. Laliberté is a French Canadian business man and legendary poker player (already my kind of guy), who owns 95 percent of Cirque du Soleil. He was a  high school dropout from a middle class family in Quebec City (his father worked at Alcoa) who became a street musician and performer. He tried a straight job at a hydroelectric power plant but when he was laid off due to a labor action, Laliberté joined a group of people who liked to walk on stilts, led by Gilles Ste-Croix, and was tutored by a group of fire-eaters. In 1982, Guy and Gilles partnered to organize a summer fair with businessman Daniel Gauthier called “La Fête Foraine.” It produced a show that toured Canada that summer.

Ste-Croix was famous for walking 56 miles across Quebec on stilts as a publicity stunt. It paid off when the government of Quebec gave Laliberté $1.5 million to put on Quebec’s 450^th anniversary celebration of French explorer Jacques Cartier. He used that to organize the company that today mounts  Cirque du Sol production all over the world. In the beginning there was “Le Grand Tour due Cirque du Soleil,” which won raves and attracted an enthusiastic audience, and gave them their name.

They played across Canada from 1983 on but never south of the border. Then in 1987, Laliberté rolled the dice on everything he had made until that point to put on his first U.S. show at the Los Angeles Arts Festival. The legend is that if the show hadn’t been successful, he didn’t have money to get the troupe home to Quebec. Instead it was the first of a series of stunning productions that earned critical acclaim and sold out specially constructed arenas all over the world.

The story is told that after the triumph in Los Angeles, Laliberté and Gauthier met with executives of Columbia Pictures who had requested a meeting to discuss a Cirque du Soleil movie. The French Canadians sniffed a rat when the contract not only licensed a movie but essentially transferred ownership of the entire operation to Columbia. They walked away and have remained private ever since.

Laliberté has made a fortune and used much of it to pursue his version of philanthropy. Most famously he pledged $100 million over 25 years to the One Drop Foundation which he created to fight poverty. Its mission is to give everyone access water. The foundation advertises that it finances projects in the third world to improve sources of water, teach food security and promote greater equality between men and women. He has a program for street kids, and uses One Drop to promote folk arts, popular theater, music dance and visual arts.

In Las Vegas, there are currently more than half a dozen Cirque shows at the Luxor, the new City Center, MGM Grand, Treasure Island, and the much talked about O at the Bellagio. I went to see Love at the Mirage, however, because it had the other magical ingredient, the Liverpool sound, which has provided the soundtrack for much of my life. Now I watched, listened and sensed the music as it drove the audio and visual smorgasbord of the Cirque in its full tilt boogey mode.

I wondered if the remaining Beatles liked the show. What I discovered was that I was with Ringo. He had seen Love on opening night and said what I wanted to say: “I loved the show and I loved the music! I think the show is really exciting. I thought the effects, the people doing their stuff, the projections were great, too much, really! I thought it was very emotional; who knew a few years ago when The Beatles were just chatting to each other making those records that we could put it to such great use. And it was emotional because two of us aren’t there. Overall, it’s a festival of love. Peace and love.”

Ringo had attended the premiere with Sir Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, among others, and all praised the production and the way it brought the music and the band back to life for a night.

As an aging baby boomer, it evoked a host of memories that made me realize the Beatles had always been there for me. When they were fresh and young, I was discovering rock and roll. When they became part of the 60s youth revolution, I was coming of age. When they went to India and began to meditate seeking spiritual answers, I began my search as well. When they protested war and famine and inequality, those were my values as well. And when they broke up and grew up and found their own place, each going in a different direction, so did I.

When John Lennon, who loved peace, was murdered, I was among the multitude that mourned and sadly sang the refrain, “Give peace a chance…”

Now the Cirque has given the Beatles legacy a new vibrancy and made it fun and enticing to a new generation, while also serving up delicious memories for those of us who grew up with John, Paul, George and Ringo.

The show ends with a full blown parade built around Sgt. Pepper and his lonely hearts band, singing that it is time to say goodbye. As the Beatles marched off into history, the music stayed inside of me, and the memory of this show was more than just good live theater, it was the heritage of my generation revived and reborn.