Join the Circus

Cirque soon embarked on what would become a close and synergistic relationship with an industry that shares its coolheaded approach to risk: gambling. At the beginning of the 1990s, Steve Wynn saw a Cirque touring show and persuaded Laliberte to bring a big top to Vegas. The show sold out. With a gambler's eye for a potential big score, Wynn offered to build a permanent home for the company in his new hotel. "Mystere" opened in December 1993 and was sold out for a year. Wynn upped the ante in 1998, building a spectacular theater for "O" in the Bellagio. It was an instant sensation, and seven years later continues to sell out three months in advance. In 2000, shortly after Wynn sold his Mirage Resorts to MGM, Laliberte got a call from Terry Lanni, CEO of the new MGM Mirage and a Cirque fan from his days at Caesars Palace. Lanni was eager to field more shows in Vegas, so Cirque developed "Zumanity" and "Ka."

The partnership has been a blockbuster for both sides. For Cirque, the deal has brought a partner willing to sink hundreds of millions into creating unique venues for its shows. As for the MGM Mirage, "Ka" alone troops 4,000 folks a night past the MGM Grand's array of upscale restaurants, shops, and roulette wheels.

Half an hour outside of Montreal, in the scruffy suburb of Saint-Michel, sits the world headquarters of Cirque du Soleil, overlooking a former dump. The 100,000-square-foot complex, fronted with corrugated steel, looks less like the home of a circus than of a food-processing plant. Inside, there are three training studios, a costume shop, and a props workshop, as well as the casting team and corporate staff. This is the Cirque "machine" -- the infrastructure on which the company's innovation process depends.

Cirque creators say that innovation, for them, always begins with a story. For example, Laliberte instructed "Ka" creator Robert Lepage to craft an epic tale that included martial arts, an art form no other Cirque show had yet explored. Then, to feed the shows' voracious appetite for hugely skilled performers, Cirque's innovation process shifts to the attraction, training, and retention of talent. Teams of new recruits are in constant training in Montreal before being dispatched to replace artists in existing shows, or to appear in new productions. With more than 700 artists (out of 3,000 total employees), culled from 40 different countries, and speaking 25 languages, the Cirque operation is like a mini United Nations, complete with translators.

At the moment, Florence Pot, head talent scout, is a woman on a mission: She's searching the globe for a quartet of wild and crazy guys for the company's next big show. The marriage of Cirque's performing arts and the Beatles' music will debut at the Mirage next summer in the space vacated by Siegfried and Roy. "The show will re-create the atmosphere of the Beatles before they were stars, when they were just young guys with no fear of trying new things," Pot says. For Cirque, that translates into a job spec that reads like a description of an L.A. skate punk: Wanted -- four rebels who can run, jump, and do somersaults on Rollerblades. Must be compact, powerful, and bouncy. Fondness for "She Loves You" a plus.

Once the Beatles show is cast, it's not as if the casting team can go home. First there's the company's annual attrition of 20% of injured or retiring performers. Then there's Ste-Croix's pledge to produce four more shows over the next four years. And Cirque doesn't want standard-issue acrobats, jugglers, or trapeze artists. Cast members must also meet demanding artistic qualifications and, depending on the particular show, unusual performance requirements. In "O," for example, performers must be scuba certified. In "Zumanity," the R-rated show at Vegas's New York, New York hotel, gymnasts may be asked to perform topless.

Those requirements can be a challenge, even to experienced performers. Michelle Cassidy, an elegant blond dancer from South Africa, initially auditioned for "Zumanity." The Cirque casting team thought she was perfect en pointe, but a nonstarter for the company's bawdy cabaret-style show. "I just wasn't out there enough," she says. She was eventually cast as La Belle, a beautiful queen, in the tamer "Mystere."

Craig Paul Smith, a world-championship-level tumbler for Great Britain, was fine with the acrobatic tricks in "O," but, he says, "I got to the point where I was scared to put my head under the water because I was panicking so much." In "O," cast members must go underwater to change costumes or pick up props. "My breakthrough came when I told myself, 'You learn how to breathe, or you go back to England and learn a trade,' " he says.