The Biggest Cirque on Earth

When Gilles Ste. Croix, a street performer in Montreal, became one of the founding members of Cirque du Soleil, the last thing he would have imagined was that someday he would find himself sitting in a Santa Monica hotel talking about a $100-million industry forging mega-deals with Las Vegas hotels, European real estate developers and 30,000-acre theme parks.

But that’s exactly what he’s doing--and he doesn’t want to. Ste. Croix, 46--who used to fly through the air, launched from a teeter-board, and land on stilts in Cirque’s first show--is bored with earthbound concepts like profits and box office.

“We were just trying to make a show and live off our art,” he says. Numbers? “I don’t know, I have no idea,” he says. “I would say a number, and I might be wrong. I don’t say numbers. I don’t learn them, and I don’t say them.”

Ste. Croix, the troupe’s director of creation, would rather talk about the theme of its ninth production, “Quidam,” opening Wednesday in Santa Monica. “Quidam is a Latin word meaning anonymous and unknown,” he says. “We are at the end of a millennium. We always pick a theme that is close to our lives, and everyone is concerned about what the end of the millennium will be like. . . . Through technology of the past 10 years, there is now a global community, but at the same time we have become more and more lonely, more individually separated; the community feeling has been forgotten.

“There have been many changes in the past five years, and there will be more in the next five. We talk about the individuals who are suffering the changes, but they don’t have a word to say about it. So quidam is the scream of all the quidams, to wake up and make themselves known.”

Ste. Croix doesn’t want to talk about the numbers. But in the second year of Cirque’s second decade, the numbers are too big to be ignored.

In 12 years, Cirque du Soleil--French for “Sun Circus”-- has transformed from an eccentric show-biz quidam into a popular global commodity with four touring shows, one permanent show in Las Vegas and three new permanent productions slated for the near future--in Vegas, at Disney World and in Berlin.

The troupe is also looking at film and television, as well as more international shows. As Cirque continues to grow, balancing art and commerce has become as precarious an act as anything you’ll see under its blue and yellow big top at the Santa Monica Pier.

“The people who created Cirque, some of them were performers, and some of them were entrepreneurs,” marketing director Jean David says. “So we found out it was very important to marry the relationship between the arts and the business, the culture and the business--it was extremely important if we want to survive. We are the kind of people who, when we learn something, we learn it forever. And we learned that at the very beginning.”

The Cirque machine has its entrepreneurs, but it is also an organization in which a publicist is as likely to have walked the tightrope in an early show as to have studied communications in college. Although it is big business, it still contains plenty of renegades like Ste. Croix, who describes the show as “acrobatics with emotion.”

Cirque was born in 1984 when Ste. Croix, founding member Guy Laliberte and a small circle of French Canadian street players put a tent over their heads and reinvented the circus as we know it. The players had already begun performing together in local festivals in the early ‘80s, calling themselves Les Echassiers.

Laliberte was the chief negotiator in bringing the troupe here for its U.S. debut at the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, an offshoot of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, in a tent at 1st and Alameda streets. Back then, festival artistic director Robert Fitzpatrick said the festival could offer Cirque only minimal financial guarantees, so its decision to venture to L.A. meant taking a substantial risk.

“Other festivals wouldn’t touch them because it wasn’t quite ‘cultural’ enough, and towns looking for a standard circus were used to dealing with horses and elephants,” says Fitzpatrick, who was first mesmerized by the troupe in Toronto on a trip with his daughter, then 12.

He decided instantly to showcase Cirque as the festival’s opening performance, though Peter Brook’s nine-hour “Mahabarata,” was the more obvious choice because it was a more serious entry with extensive artistic credentials.

Cirque sold out every night, says Fitzpatrick, former chairman of Euro Disney and now dean of the Columbia School of the Arts in New York. “If I’d been smart, and rich, I would have paid all of their costs and taken 10%,” he adds ruefully.

Even in its early days, Fitzpatrick says, the Cirque clan was hardly wide-eyed when it came to business: “That’s part of the savvy myth they have created. For all the ‘naivete’ and street smarts they are supposed to have instead of MBAs, these guys can negotiate like Michael Ovitz and still come off well.”

The exponential growth of Cirque would indicate Fitzpatrick is right. It boasts a worldwide staff of 1,250, including 266 performers from around the world. There are two main offices--in Montreal (where a $30-million headquarters is under construction) and in Amsterdam--as well as a permanent office in Las Vegas.

More than 7.5 million people have seen its shows, which include “Cirque du Soleil--Le grand tour” (1984), “La magie continue” (1986), “We Reinvent the Circus” (1987-89), “Nouvelle Experience” (1990-91), “Saltimbanco” (1992-96), “Mystere” (running since 1993 at Las Vegas’ Treasure Island hotel), “Alegria” (1994-98) and the new “Quidam,” which will tour through 2002. Tours have taken the troupe to 118 cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Tokyo, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Vienna.

Although Cirque officials decline to spout budget figures, Alan Feldman, spokesman for Mirage Resorts, which owns Treasure Island, said $27 million was spent building the permanent theater for “Mystere” and $24 million more on creating the show. Feldman adds that “Mystere” ranks as the second most financially successful show in Vegas, topped only by the Mirage Hotel’s Siegfried & Roy show, featuring the flamboyant German magicians and their cadre of lions and white tigers.

The Siegfried & Roy act earns about $54 million in ticket sales; “ ‘Mystere’ brings in about $40 million,” Feldman says. “There’s not a Broadway show in the land that does as well.”

The cost of “Mystere” more than doubles the current budget for the touring shows, which Cirque public relations director Diane Laberge reluctantly estimates at between $10 million and $15 million. (This year Cirque will replace the big top’s bleacher seating with chairs.)

In 1998, Cirque plans to open an as-yet-unnamed show in Las Vegas at the soon-to-be-built $1.3-billion 3,000-room Bellagio Hotel and casino--the troupe’s self-described first “water production.” For it, the Bellagio complex, also a Mirage Resorts hotel, is building a $50-million 1,800-seat water theater to Cirque’s specifications. The production budget: more than $20 million. Marketing director David would reveal only that the show will take place “in the water, on the water, over the water” in an area the size of three Olympic swimming pools.

Also in 1998, Cirque is to open a new show at the 30,000-acre Disney World in Orlando, performing in a 70,000-square-foot, 1,650-seat theater that will be part of the Disney Village Marketplace entertainment district with the House of Blues, a Wolfgang Puck Cafe, Virgin Records and 24 AMC theater screens. It’s a 12-year deal for two shows a day, five days a week.

Cirque has also reached an agreement with German real estate developers Peter and Isolde Kottmair to open a new show in 2000 in a new $52-million permanent theater in the heart of Berlin. That agreement extends to 2015.

Cirque officials, as well as representatives of the new venues, agree that Treasure Island’s success with a grand-scale version of the show triggered the new deals. Feldman says Cirque came along just as Mirage Resorts and other Vegas hotels were trying to broaden their family appeal, as well as to attract a more sophisticated international clientele.

Feldman notes that Cirque, like Siegfried & Roy, appealed to Mirage because it transcends language barriers:

“It isn’t like Bill Cosby. We love Bill Cosby, but if you don’t speak English, it’s going to be a tough evening. And [someone like] Kenny Rogers, who we also love dearly--if you really don’t like country music, if Cher is your thing, then Kenny is going to be tough to spend an evening with. . . . We saw Cirque in Chicago and Los Angeles and immediately reacted to the humanity and excitement. But we wanted something bigger; there’s only so much you can do in a tent when you are traveling every six weeks.”

In order to feed an increasingly hungry appetite, Cirque officials are combing the globe for potential artists. Cirque has an affiliation with the National Circus School in Montreal and finds artists at prestigious circus schools in Russia and Europe. The organization also draws talent from Olympic competition. The Olympics may also become the talent pool, no pun intended, for the Bellagio water show.

“[Some athletes] do the Olympics, and then their career is finished,” David says. “If you are the 10th- or 12th-best diver in the world, nobody talks about you anymore. Yet they are fantastic performers, fantastic athletes. We do recruit those types of people.”

Whether drawn from the Olympics or from circus schools, most Cirque artists undergo a year of training with the troupe’s coaches.

“They are fantastic gymnasts,” David says, “but they don’t know how to dance, they don’t know how to smile on the stage, how to cry on the stage, how to sing. We teach them those things.”

Along with training its artists to think Cirque-like, observers say, the troupe has fought off all comers who would change them. About eight years ago, David says, Cirque was approached by Columbia Pictures about doing a movie. About the same time, partly because of Fitzpatrick’s ties to Disney through his former Euro Disney chairmanship, Cirque also began talking to Disney. Cirque nixed both efforts for fear of losing creative control.

“We were young and they were big,” David says now of Disney. “They are still big, but we are not as young. And then Columbia Pictures at the time also tried to do something with us, but you know, they were asking for too much, and we said, ‘No, sorry. Forget it.’ They wanted to put us in a position where we would have to change what we are, to do something we didn’t believe in. We said, ‘No, sorry. We don’t make a deal on that basis.’ ”

Although there still are no deals with Columbia, Disney World’s Weiss says Disney is more than willing to give a more mature Cirque complete creative control. Where Las Vegas wanted Cirque mostly to increase family appeal, Weiss adds, Disney World wants the troupe for the opposite reason: to expand its attractions for adult audiences.

Hollywood remains more elusive.

“We found it’s not easy to just take the Cirque production and put it on the air,” David says. “There’s a need to adapt your production to television, we understand that. So we are still talking to Hollywood, Hollywood is talking to us. . . . For each of our shows, we create 40 or 50 very original characters; each character offers a lot of possibilities for major television production.”

Along with the new productions, David says, Cirque has its eye on Tokyo, London’s theater district and Broadway. It all raises the question: When does the big top get too big?

“I don’t think any of us knows what that point is,” Fitzpatrick says. “I went to see them in Las Vegas, and I’ve seen them in other places, and I’m always a bit worried: Have they ‘gone Hollywood’ in the worst connotation of that term? And to my joy and surprise, they’ve kept the edge.”

David says Cirque is determined to walk that edge.

“There is an enormous demand for what we are doing; we could have 20 permanent productions around the world, just from the offers that we have,” he says. “But we don’t take all the business offers that we have, because we know that we cannot. We have to take time to respect the people in each of these productions. You do not rush the characters; you do not rush the designers. But we were ready for the new contracts we signed.

“We learned a lot with the experience at Treasure Island. We were used to touring, and we thought it would be very difficult to be in one city, and Las Vegas--my God, not everybody wants to live there. But, in fact, it’s not tough at all, living conditions are wonderful, people are very nice. Artists are buying their own houses, with pools. . . . People are happy.”

And Cirque will probably always have people like Ste. Croix to make sure business never overwhelms the pleasure.

“Every two years, we change 30% [of each show],” Ste. Croix says. “And we don’t have shows that are the same; we can’t. When you do a musical like ‘Cats’ or ‘Phantom,’ you can have 10 of them. The cast influences what our content is.

“I look for artists who have an open mind. . . . We don’t want stars; we want really a team spirit. Of course, there are some people who are making a big impression, but we will not put them on a billboard.

“We were 12 people; now we are 1,200. We’ve become a great success, and I think Guy Laliberte is very responsible for that; he always took great care in keeping the spirit of what Cirque was in the beginning, to see that we do things in a respectful way.

“We must not let that go. It is what we do for a living. We don’t make T-shirts; we make shows. So if we cannot do this anymore because we have too many shows? We should stop making so many shows.”

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Cirque du Soleil’s “Quidam,” Santa Monica Pier, Wednesday through Nov. 3. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Fridays, 6 and 9:30 p.m. (with the exception of this week, when there will be only an 8 p.m. show); Saturdays, 4:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 1 and 5 p.m. Adults, $16.50 to $45.50; children, $8.25 to $31.75. (800) 678-5440.