OOP! ACK!
I went to see Le Rêve at the Wynn.
My reaction:
Now let's do some homework on this thing, which I did before the show began, via the internet on my piddly Pantech phone, while sitting in the beautiful theatre that Le Rêve plays in. (I wanted to see the run-time of the show, which I found out after sitting through the debacle, that it's an hour and a half long.)
As I was putting away my phone after I dug up a little info, a really nasty and mean usher yelled at me for having my phone on. The thing takes shitty pictures, it's not like it's an iPhone or a camcorder, it's a piece of shit phone that ANYONE with a trained eye, like those ushers are supposed to have, would see. I don't know what the hell she could have been on about, besides, I don't want to tape the show, I want to watch it with my full attention, but that's another shortcoming of the Wynn in my opinion. Then again, shortsighted and rude people piss me off anyways.
Anyways, let's forget the rude usher and get down to what I found while I had time to dig a bit:
The Wikipedia Entry on Le Rêve
Ok, first thing we see is a name. Franco Dragone. Now, let's be very clear on this...because of "creative differences" (BTW, I'd cite that as well to get my name off of the disaster before anyone catches on...) he basically said, "My work here is done..." and got paid off, and demanded that his name be removed off of all of the collateral that advertises the show around Las Vegas. I DO NOT, for a single second, blame the man for distancing himself from it.
Le Rêve is a disaster. Save your money, don't go. Now before you get your panties in a wad and say "Oh I loved it and oh Sheri you suck...blah blah blah", hear me out.
OK, let's set the way back clock for 2003, I moved up to Montreal. Ok, it's cold there, it's NINE MONTHS OF COLD ASS WINTER. In the immortal words of my husband, "When you endure Nine Months of winter every year, it gives you lots of time to dream." Trust me, I've been through it and he is ABSOLUTELY right. When it's snowing sideways and it's 40 below zero, trust me, you keep your ass inside and you find something to do with your time, which is mainly sleeping; hence you spend a LOT of time dreaming. Hence, this is what is at the heart of Cirque du Soleil. OK, now how come I just brought up Cirque? Because...dig into our friend Franco Dragone's website...guess what you'll find... his biography. Now you'll notice that he has been a part of the vision of Cirque since 1982 when he met Guy La Liberté, you guessed it, the brain and founder of Cirque Du Soleil. Also, you'll find out that he did another Quebecois show in Vegas, "A New Day", that's right, Celine Dion's show. Ok, I just passed on Celine. Not going there, not doing it, not going ot sit through her yodeling for an hour and a half for a ridiculous ticket price. Sorry, but no.
Let's keep going though, because Le Rêve was just THAT bad. You could hear in the music that it was intended to be sung in French, because most of the melody lines in the music are based around Quebec folk songs...ok Quebec = French. Don't even try to get around it. It's a French Province. The only one in Canada. Don't get down on them, because they are really fine people, a little snooty if you don't speak fluent French, but good folks for the most part. They own the phrase "joie de vivre", which means "Joy of/for Life", everything they do is with passion, not always purpose, but passion none the less. This is evident in EVERY SINGLE Cirque production. You get swept up in a fantastic dream, no detail left untouched or unperfected. OK in Le Rêve, there were plenty of missed details, the one being most glaring to me is that the songs were sung in English. Now all of the soda-straw-viewpoint Americans will scream "This is America, speak english!" OK, for those of you saying that, allow me to punch you square in the face for being so narrow-minded and self-centered. If you have never experienced Cirque in French, you are missing out HUGELY. Ok, when I go to a Cirque show, I EXPECT if not DEMAND that everything be done right, which means it stays in French. I can't understand a damn word of it, but you know what, it's so visually stunning, I don't care if they're singing it in Swahili, it's that good, you don't need to hear it in your native tongue to understand what is going on in front of you. BUT, in Le Rêve, it was sung in English. *SIGH* Which took half of the magic out of it because you were too busy trying to understand what they were singing instead of keeping your eyes on the show. It was distracting.
Ok, but let's unfold this thing for all it's worth because I'm gonna save you between $99 and $179. Because in my opinion, a DVD rental of an old Cirque show like Alegria or Delirium has far more value.
Now the theatre in itself is gorgeous. On first glance, it looks very much like you're under the big top (can anyone say CIRQUE real loud? Because the influence was very apparent). In the middle of the room is the million gallon tank. That sucker looked small, but you knew that puppy HAD to be deep. So anyways, there's a bed floating in the middle of it, ok quick French lesson "Le Rêve" means "Dream" in French. Ok, so the bed made sense, someone's going to sleep (wish it had been me so I'd have missed it) and the show is about their dream. Fine. I'm cool with that.
Then the creepiness began. There is a ball that is at the center of the big top that drops down and you see a fetal infant. As in, still in the womb, start to talk, telling everyone how the effects used in the show aren't harmful that you could possibly hurt the performers if you use flash photography, yada yada. OK, that baby was creepy. Out and out creepy. How many ways can you spell "ewww"? I should have known that it was only going to go downhill from there. An in-utero baby? EWWWW! But alas, this show is by a guy from the Cirque school, so I go "Ohhhkayyy" and decide to roll with the punches.
Then the main character comes out, coming home from a date with her boyfriend, they're about to get down when some guys (who we eventually find out are the clowns: can you say ANOTHER glaring Cirque reference?) interrupt and insist that she goes to bed alone. Fine, hooray for sensible dating and not giving away the goods on the first date, fine, we're cool. She gets into a bed floating on water, ok, can handle it, suspension of disbelief kicking in, and she's wooshed away for us to see later.
I'll skip all of the acrobatic feats, the clowns, the tumblers, the high divers, the strongmen, but oh wait here comes...A MAMBO NUMBER!!!
A WHAT?
A MAMBO NUMBER! Self-absorbed men dressed in open front "button down" shirts with tight jazz pants on dancing like they are the shit and girls in mambo skirts. Dancing on a stage covered in water! Since when the fuck has anyone ever dreamed about people doing the mambo on water? Ok, Gene Kelly maybe, or maybe you have, but I sure as shit haven't. I looked at my husband, my husband looked and me and we both went, "What the fuck?". It seemed as if we had been ripped at a million miles an hour from our Quebec-induced dream into a cheap and CHEESY stage show at a cheap and cheesy hotel, cheap cigar smoke and all. At this point, I started pitying the performers. Gosh knows, they were wonderful, very talented and skilled and they're probably only doing this for a paycheck because they've got to know how bad the show sucks from sitting through it once in the seats.
So, the show keeps going except all of a sudden: "WOOOOOP WOOOOOOP WOOOOOOP", you guessed it, the fire alarms inside the Wynn Hotel went off. The theatre goes to house lights, the performers in the middle of the elevated platform about to commence the next number were looking at each other as if to go "OH SHIT!" Yes, that's right $99-$179 interrupted by a fire alarm which caused technical difficulties for the show. OH, I can only imagine the tech guys in the back all yelling "Shit" at the same time as the performers. People started to leave. The guy in the mixing booth all of a sudden says over the P.A. System that "We're having technical difficulties, please remain seated", to which my husband says "yeah, that's the first thing you do, you keep butts in the seats, that way not many people ask for refunds." Ok, our tickets were free, but let me tell you, if I'd spent the money that the other people had in that theatre, I'd have asked for my money back for SEVERAL different reasons, not just for the fire alarm.
So, while the house lights are up, out come the clowns...the four of them were really good. They made me laugh. But, as fate would have it, the nightmare that is Le Rêve wasn't over. The house lights go down, they pick up where the time frame for the show is currently set for, we missed an entire act because of the "technical difficulty". So, they do the number and then what do we get after a gorgeous display of high diving??
MAMBO NUMBER!
Ok, I ask again, what the fuck is a Mambo number, not just one but TWO Mambo numbers (COMPLETE WITH TACKY COSTUMES AND DISCO BALL) doing in the middle of a fucking Dream? I ask you...whoever decided on that needs to stop smoking whatever they're smoking because it's sure as hell is not legal in these 50 states, that's for sure. All I could hear in my head was a line by Robin Williams in the film "The Birdcage" going "Tell Beatrice and Dante to get the Mambo number ready and we'll be down in 5 minutes". A disco ball in a show about a dream. I can now say I've seen it all. Someone who IS NOT from Quebec stuck their dick in the middle of that show and all of those sweet and talented performers are paying the price for it.
But all in all, the stage was spectacular, the diving, the strongmen, all of the Cirque aspects were wonderful, but come on, two mambo numbers??
Point is, that most shows from the Cirque school have a point. Whether it's sex ("Zumanity"), perseverance ("Ka"), the wonders of life/biology/nature ("Mystere"), water ("O"), they all have a point and central theme, making all the pieces in it come together to form The Human Circus that is the Cirque Du Soleil school.
My point is, if you can't live up to the bar that Cirque puts up, don't put a French name on your Las Vegas Strip Hotel show. That's just common sense. But the disaster I saw tonight was just another round of in-house politics being seen in bright relief by the public. Someone being paid millions of dollars to run a casino didn't trust his artists in the showroom, and that's why Le Rêve is a flat out disaster.
OOP! ACK! Berkley Breathed had to have come up with that for Bill the Cat AFTER he saw Le Rêve. Casino heads, if you're going to hire someone like Dragone, let the man do his thing. He has EARNED, a hundred times over, the right to be left alone to his vision that's going to make YOU millions in the long run.
*shudder* Something happens to a man when they put on a neck tie, it cuts off the oxygen to their brains.
One last thing. If you have an expensive show interrupted, you really should have people outside waiting to hand out vouchers for another show OR a free meal or something, because it was unacceptable in the way it was handled.
My reaction:
Now let's do some homework on this thing, which I did before the show began, via the internet on my piddly Pantech phone, while sitting in the beautiful theatre that Le Rêve plays in. (I wanted to see the run-time of the show, which I found out after sitting through the debacle, that it's an hour and a half long.)
As I was putting away my phone after I dug up a little info, a really nasty and mean usher yelled at me for having my phone on. The thing takes shitty pictures, it's not like it's an iPhone or a camcorder, it's a piece of shit phone that ANYONE with a trained eye, like those ushers are supposed to have, would see. I don't know what the hell she could have been on about, besides, I don't want to tape the show, I want to watch it with my full attention, but that's another shortcoming of the Wynn in my opinion. Then again, shortsighted and rude people piss me off anyways.
Anyways, let's forget the rude usher and get down to what I found while I had time to dig a bit:
The Wikipedia Entry on Le Rêve
Ok, first thing we see is a name. Franco Dragone. Now, let's be very clear on this...because of "creative differences" (BTW, I'd cite that as well to get my name off of the disaster before anyone catches on...) he basically said, "My work here is done..." and got paid off, and demanded that his name be removed off of all of the collateral that advertises the show around Las Vegas. I DO NOT, for a single second, blame the man for distancing himself from it.
Le Rêve is a disaster. Save your money, don't go. Now before you get your panties in a wad and say "Oh I loved it and oh Sheri you suck...blah blah blah", hear me out.
OK, let's set the way back clock for 2003, I moved up to Montreal. Ok, it's cold there, it's NINE MONTHS OF COLD ASS WINTER. In the immortal words of my husband, "When you endure Nine Months of winter every year, it gives you lots of time to dream." Trust me, I've been through it and he is ABSOLUTELY right. When it's snowing sideways and it's 40 below zero, trust me, you keep your ass inside and you find something to do with your time, which is mainly sleeping; hence you spend a LOT of time dreaming. Hence, this is what is at the heart of Cirque du Soleil. OK, now how come I just brought up Cirque? Because...dig into our friend Franco Dragone's website...guess what you'll find... his biography. Now you'll notice that he has been a part of the vision of Cirque since 1982 when he met Guy La Liberté, you guessed it, the brain and founder of Cirque Du Soleil. Also, you'll find out that he did another Quebecois show in Vegas, "A New Day", that's right, Celine Dion's show. Ok, I just passed on Celine. Not going there, not doing it, not going ot sit through her yodeling for an hour and a half for a ridiculous ticket price. Sorry, but no.
Let's keep going though, because Le Rêve was just THAT bad. You could hear in the music that it was intended to be sung in French, because most of the melody lines in the music are based around Quebec folk songs...ok Quebec = French. Don't even try to get around it. It's a French Province. The only one in Canada. Don't get down on them, because they are really fine people, a little snooty if you don't speak fluent French, but good folks for the most part. They own the phrase "joie de vivre", which means "Joy of/for Life", everything they do is with passion, not always purpose, but passion none the less. This is evident in EVERY SINGLE Cirque production. You get swept up in a fantastic dream, no detail left untouched or unperfected. OK in Le Rêve, there were plenty of missed details, the one being most glaring to me is that the songs were sung in English. Now all of the soda-straw-viewpoint Americans will scream "This is America, speak english!" OK, for those of you saying that, allow me to punch you square in the face for being so narrow-minded and self-centered. If you have never experienced Cirque in French, you are missing out HUGELY. Ok, when I go to a Cirque show, I EXPECT if not DEMAND that everything be done right, which means it stays in French. I can't understand a damn word of it, but you know what, it's so visually stunning, I don't care if they're singing it in Swahili, it's that good, you don't need to hear it in your native tongue to understand what is going on in front of you. BUT, in Le Rêve, it was sung in English. *SIGH* Which took half of the magic out of it because you were too busy trying to understand what they were singing instead of keeping your eyes on the show. It was distracting.
Ok, but let's unfold this thing for all it's worth because I'm gonna save you between $99 and $179. Because in my opinion, a DVD rental of an old Cirque show like Alegria or Delirium has far more value.
Now the theatre in itself is gorgeous. On first glance, it looks very much like you're under the big top (can anyone say CIRQUE real loud? Because the influence was very apparent). In the middle of the room is the million gallon tank. That sucker looked small, but you knew that puppy HAD to be deep. So anyways, there's a bed floating in the middle of it, ok quick French lesson "Le Rêve" means "Dream" in French. Ok, so the bed made sense, someone's going to sleep (wish it had been me so I'd have missed it) and the show is about their dream. Fine. I'm cool with that.
Then the creepiness began. There is a ball that is at the center of the big top that drops down and you see a fetal infant. As in, still in the womb, start to talk, telling everyone how the effects used in the show aren't harmful that you could possibly hurt the performers if you use flash photography, yada yada. OK, that baby was creepy. Out and out creepy. How many ways can you spell "ewww"? I should have known that it was only going to go downhill from there. An in-utero baby? EWWWW! But alas, this show is by a guy from the Cirque school, so I go "Ohhhkayyy" and decide to roll with the punches.
Then the main character comes out, coming home from a date with her boyfriend, they're about to get down when some guys (who we eventually find out are the clowns: can you say ANOTHER glaring Cirque reference?) interrupt and insist that she goes to bed alone. Fine, hooray for sensible dating and not giving away the goods on the first date, fine, we're cool. She gets into a bed floating on water, ok, can handle it, suspension of disbelief kicking in, and she's wooshed away for us to see later.
I'll skip all of the acrobatic feats, the clowns, the tumblers, the high divers, the strongmen, but oh wait here comes...A MAMBO NUMBER!!!
A WHAT?
A MAMBO NUMBER! Self-absorbed men dressed in open front "button down" shirts with tight jazz pants on dancing like they are the shit and girls in mambo skirts. Dancing on a stage covered in water! Since when the fuck has anyone ever dreamed about people doing the mambo on water? Ok, Gene Kelly maybe, or maybe you have, but I sure as shit haven't. I looked at my husband, my husband looked and me and we both went, "What the fuck?". It seemed as if we had been ripped at a million miles an hour from our Quebec-induced dream into a cheap and CHEESY stage show at a cheap and cheesy hotel, cheap cigar smoke and all. At this point, I started pitying the performers. Gosh knows, they were wonderful, very talented and skilled and they're probably only doing this for a paycheck because they've got to know how bad the show sucks from sitting through it once in the seats.
So, the show keeps going except all of a sudden: "WOOOOOP WOOOOOOP WOOOOOOP", you guessed it, the fire alarms inside the Wynn Hotel went off. The theatre goes to house lights, the performers in the middle of the elevated platform about to commence the next number were looking at each other as if to go "OH SHIT!" Yes, that's right $99-$179 interrupted by a fire alarm which caused technical difficulties for the show. OH, I can only imagine the tech guys in the back all yelling "Shit" at the same time as the performers. People started to leave. The guy in the mixing booth all of a sudden says over the P.A. System that "We're having technical difficulties, please remain seated", to which my husband says "yeah, that's the first thing you do, you keep butts in the seats, that way not many people ask for refunds." Ok, our tickets were free, but let me tell you, if I'd spent the money that the other people had in that theatre, I'd have asked for my money back for SEVERAL different reasons, not just for the fire alarm.
So, while the house lights are up, out come the clowns...the four of them were really good. They made me laugh. But, as fate would have it, the nightmare that is Le Rêve wasn't over. The house lights go down, they pick up where the time frame for the show is currently set for, we missed an entire act because of the "technical difficulty". So, they do the number and then what do we get after a gorgeous display of high diving??
MAMBO NUMBER!
Ok, I ask again, what the fuck is a Mambo number, not just one but TWO Mambo numbers (COMPLETE WITH TACKY COSTUMES AND DISCO BALL) doing in the middle of a fucking Dream? I ask you...whoever decided on that needs to stop smoking whatever they're smoking because it's sure as hell is not legal in these 50 states, that's for sure. All I could hear in my head was a line by Robin Williams in the film "The Birdcage" going "Tell Beatrice and Dante to get the Mambo number ready and we'll be down in 5 minutes". A disco ball in a show about a dream. I can now say I've seen it all. Someone who IS NOT from Quebec stuck their dick in the middle of that show and all of those sweet and talented performers are paying the price for it.
But all in all, the stage was spectacular, the diving, the strongmen, all of the Cirque aspects were wonderful, but come on, two mambo numbers??
Point is, that most shows from the Cirque school have a point. Whether it's sex ("Zumanity"), perseverance ("Ka"), the wonders of life/biology/nature ("Mystere"), water ("O"), they all have a point and central theme, making all the pieces in it come together to form The Human Circus that is the Cirque Du Soleil school.
My point is, if you can't live up to the bar that Cirque puts up, don't put a French name on your Las Vegas Strip Hotel show. That's just common sense. But the disaster I saw tonight was just another round of in-house politics being seen in bright relief by the public. Someone being paid millions of dollars to run a casino didn't trust his artists in the showroom, and that's why Le Rêve is a flat out disaster.
OOP! ACK! Berkley Breathed had to have come up with that for Bill the Cat AFTER he saw Le Rêve. Casino heads, if you're going to hire someone like Dragone, let the man do his thing. He has EARNED, a hundred times over, the right to be left alone to his vision that's going to make YOU millions in the long run.
*shudder* Something happens to a man when they put on a neck tie, it cuts off the oxygen to their brains.
One last thing. If you have an expensive show interrupted, you really should have people outside waiting to hand out vouchers for another show OR a free meal or something, because it was unacceptable in the way it was handled.
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