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| Cirque Founder Talks Criss Angel’s New Show | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Apr 28 2008, 02:15 PM (26 Views) | |
| Post #1 Apr 28 2008, 02:15 PM | darrenromeofan36 |
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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: CIRQUE FOUNDER TALKS CRISS ANGEL’S NEW SHOW AND PLANS FOR ELVIS PRESLEY SHOW April 22nd, 2008 The new Criss Angel Believe! Magic show from Cirque du Soleil is founder Guy LaLiberté’s biggest Vegas bet to-date. Insiders tell me by the time it opens in September with its gala premiere night on September 12 Cirque may have up to $150 million on the line. It’s the first time the Montreal-based circus spectacle company has staged a show around one single star! I got to chat with Guy while he was at the Bellagio for a big bucks poker tournament. RL: Today you announced the new Criss Angel Cirque du Soleil show Believe. How do you feel about this magic spectacular? GL: I feel very good. I think this is a great artistic match. Criss and I have been flirting with each other for many years and it will be a great show. It will be new and fresh. RL: This is the first time where you have had a solo star. You have built the show around one man—that could create problems if he gets sick. GL: This is part of the risk, but I think that with the risk, he is not working with wild animals so we eliminate that risk so we will try to make sure he is not roller skating too much and going to bde early, but we will see. I think Criss still has a lot of energy and he is very dedicated to the show. It is his dream and I think he will be there for a long while. RL: How do you describe the partnership with Criss? GL: It is a full partnership in the sense that creatively we have established a way of functioning. Criss brought all these ideas and we had creative people surround him. It was a great debate about the story. Criss wanted to have a show that represented him and we are there to package the entire show to make sure that we have 600-700,000 people for the next 20 years who will come to see it. RL: Magic like we have never seen before? GL: I think so. I think there will be some amazing things and Criss has his style and I think he will bring something new to magic and Las Vegas. RL: Now you have Criss ready to go you are turning the drawing boards over to the Elvis Presley project at MGM’s CityCenter, where incidentally you are going to live on-top of your new theater! GL: This is another big challenge. He is another amazing great icon in the States, he along with The Beatles. We will give a twist to Elvis and prepare his return to Vegas in a great way. RL: Similar to your Beatles Love show at The Mirage where you never really see the Fab Four? GL: No this is a totally different approach. We don’t do things twice the same way. It is different. There are a lot of surprises. People will meet Elvis in a way they have not since he passed away. Guy also attended the opening of his sculptor friend, Richard MacDonald’s new gallery transformed from the lobby of Cirque’s “O” Theater at the Bellagio. Guy will also be working with the artist on another gallery at the CityCenter Elvis Theater and in Macau at their shows there in the Chinese gaming enclave. The sculptor has created extraordinary lifelike castings of the various Cirque characters. My conversation with Guy continued: RL: How did you find this man, how did he find you and what do you like about his amazing work? GL: Actually Richard found us. He is a famous sculptor—he has been in the business longer than Cirque. I heard one day about this sculptor who was flying in my artists to his studio to model for him. I got curious and he sent us a piece of his work and I fell in love with it. His aesthetical work is amazing. RL: They as so incredibly lifelike they look as if they will spring into action any moment! GL: When you see how he works in the studio with the artists it is a long process. He is very dedicated and passionate. I like to recognize artists at Cirque, where the art is like the work we do. We engaged in conversation about possibly doing something together and here we are.” The sculptor who admitted that he’s seen “O” 11 times said his works sell from as low as $990 and go all the way up to $440,000. “It is not easy to take a long theater lobby and turn it into an art gallery for sculpture,” he told me. It turns out while talking to Guy and Richard that they revealed their original plan for converting the lobby into a gallery had been nixed by prior Bellagio owner Steve Wynn. Said Guy: “Basically Steve told me to run my shows and he’d run the casino!” Current Bellagio president Randy Morton told me he had no idea why Steve had turned down the original idea. “It was the first time I’d heard the story,” he said. “When we were presented with it Bobby Baldwin, Bill McBeath and I immediately said yes. Bobby is a big supporter of Richard MacDonald’s work, his sculpture is fine art; it is monumental. They are so well received and successful. It adds life and passion into the entry into the theater. I don’t know why it wasn’t done before, but what I do know is that when Guy and Richard presented the idea to us here at the Bellagio, it was a wow. The space was a transition for popcorn, soda and licorice to get in and out of the show. We had this volume of space available and it is really dark during the day. Now we are opening the gallery every morning at 9 a.m. The popcorn and soda is conveniently hidden behind the curtains around the artwork. As the show is about to begin, the curtains drop and this becomes an enormous profit center for us. We sell the best popcorn in town. We have a flow of people coming in all day long now and Richard MacDonald is his own destination so for us it is an added attraction, a reason to come to the Bellagio. It supports our other art exhibit. We now have two exhibits here at the Bellagio and a lot of our guests are going to both. Our American Modernism gallery is a museum, a beautiful museum. Our shows have rotated every six-nine months and it’s so powerful to stand on its own that our gallery members keep coming back. They don’t just come to the gallery once a year, but two and three times. Our current American Modernism exhibit that we partnered up with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is doing a great job. The partnership is phenomenal. It is not a hard sell.” |
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10:49 AM Jul 11