Cirque de Celine

On Jan. 1, 2000, the story goes, Celine Dion, exhausted from touring and wanting to be a stay-at-home wife and mother, came to Las Vegas with her manager-husband and 250 of their family and friends. The couple renewed their wedding vows. They also saw “O,” the Cirque du Soleil spectacular on water at the Bellagio, and so moved and flabbergasted was Dion that she came to an inevitable conclusion: She wanted one for herself.

She’s getting one. In “A New Day,” which is what her new Vegas extravaganza is called, Dion, strapped to a harness, soars 50 feet in the air, to the top of the massive proscenium, as she belts out the love ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

It seems safe to say Barbra Streisand wouldn’t try this once, much less 200 times a year, which is what Dion is contracted to do. She will perform five nights a week for the next three years, in a 4,100-seat theater built for her by Caesars Palace. Her dressing room in the Colosseum is 2,600 square feet, with a formal dining room.

Dion’s not getting her own circus, but something dreamier -- a show “by Dragone.” That’s Franco Dragone, the Belgian conjurer behind “O” and “Mystere” in Vegas and eight other Cirque shows that have either toured or played permanently somewhere in the world.

It is Vegas as the new diva idyll: all the glory and money of touring without the air miles. Rene Angelil, who was guiding Dion’s career long before he married her, hints that several other major pop stars are enviously watching what he has engineered for Dion -- guaranteed millions in an industry whose sales aren’t what they used to be.

Amid all the hype, there remains the possibility that the show will flop, to the delight of Dion haters, or simply run out of gas, vindicating those on the Strip who see this as a vanity act backed by fuzzy math.

Tickets for “A New Day” start at $87.50 and climb to $200 -- tops for a permanent show in Vegas, but not insanely high by today’s standards.

Though Las Vegas night life still evokes Elvis Presley’s period of drug-addled bloat and plates of $9.99 prime rib, multinational corporations now control the Strip, and Dion’s show, like so much of popular entertainment, represents the merging interests of big money.

“A New Day” opens March 25, timed to the release on Sony’s Epic label of Dion’s latest album, called “One Heart,” and her own perfume, called Celine Dion. CBS is airing a Dion special that night. Chrysler, for whom Dion recently appeared in slick black-and-white commercials with her 2-year-old son, Rene-Charles, is a presenting sponsor of the Vegas show, and AEG Live, the live entertainment arm of Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz’s empire, fronted the money to get the production up and running, to the tune of $40 million, several sources said.

But only Dragone and Dion are guaranteed big paydays, with some reports putting the singer’s take at $45 million or more over the life of the deal.

Park Place Entertainment, the corporation that owns Caesars Palace and four other properties on the Strip, has boasted that it shelled out $95 million to build Dion’s theater -- even though Caesars won’t be getting any of the revenue from ticket sales.

Instead, Park Place is gambling that “A New Day” will draw some 20,000 patrons a week to Caesars, injecting new life into a casino that has been eclipsed by higher-end competitors like Bellagio and Mandalay Bay.

Shows, once considered a nice extra for the loyal gambler, are now seen by the casinos as gate attractions in themselves, given the Strip’s push toward big-theme mass entertainments. Casinos are opening lavish nightclubs and looking for the next franchise show.

If the Mirage is synonymous with Siegfried & Roy, and Bellagio has “O,” Caesars has been without an entertainment brand for decades. Having passed on Cirque du Soleil when the French Canadian circus was trying to establish itself on the Strip, Caesars is now paying a much bigger price to catch up.

This is a game in which Cirque du Soleil has come to redefine what big-time Vegas entertainment means.

The Belgian connection

For Dion, working under Dragone means her famously bony frame is developing new muscles. “My legs are changing, my arms are changing,” Dion said one afternoon before rehearsal, interviewed in a 10,000-square-foot villa suite at Caesars that had been commandeered for several hours of promotion by Team Celine.

With Dion as muse, Dragone has created a new genre of entertainment: the fanciful evocation of a diva, contrived for an audience Dragone refers to as “deep America.”

He has found the perfect singer to hoist 50 feet in the air. Dion, as her admirers and detractors know, is a big singer -- heart on the sleeve at all times.

There are seven songs with the word “love” in the title in her set list for “A New Day.” Predictably, there is a combination of her melodramatic hits, torch songs and crowd-pleasers -- “My Heart Will Go On,” the love theme from “Titanic”; the Louis Armstrong classic “What a Wonderful World”; the French ballad “Je t’aime Encore.”

There is no story, but there will be plenty to look at -- what people behind the scenes cryptically call “pure Franco”: flying musical instruments, trees that come from beneath the stage and blossom. And, of course, the moon, a giant moon. It appears on the show’s most spectacular set piece, a high-definition movie screen that is 34 feet by 110 feet, a $6-million piece of technology that provides the show’s various three-dimensional backdrops, or tableaux.

“We see people flying, but I wanted to take a break from Cirque, you know?” Dragone said one day during a break from “creation,” the Cirque word for rehearsal.

The son of Italian immigrants who moved to La Louviere, Belgium, where his father worked in a steel factory, Dragone, 50, has thick, wavy hair and a reputation on the Strip for being an enigmatic genius.

He has left Cirque to form his own company. Upon launching “A New Day,” Dragone will turn more of his attention to two projects with Steve Wynn, the maverick Vegas showman and hotelier. Dragone is creating another aquatic experience at La Reve, the new Wynn property scheduled to open in 2005, and another at a Wynn resort in Mong Kok, a gambling mecca near Hong Kong.

As a youth in Belgium, Dragone said, he flirted with Marxism and later became involved in political street theater. Asked about the eye-opening ticket prices for “A New Day,” Dragone responded, in his halting English, by paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht: “Three dollars for the theater, one for the bread.”

The show’s 50 or so cast members spent months in La Louviere, working with Dragone. They are dancers, mostly, not acrobats, because this show is not about feats of derring-do. What did they learn? According to “A New Day’s” choreographer, Mia Michaels, one of Dragone’s mottos was: “If we don’t have a moment of magic in a rehearsal, we’ve lost an entire day.”

“You’re seeing things that are very Franco,” she said of the show, without elaborating. “Things are not literal at all.”

For the Dion show, Dragone employed key collaborators from Cirque, including Michele Crete, his scenic designer, and artistic director Pavel Brun, a Russian circus veteran.

To go behind the scenes of “creation” is to enter a world of French speakers who talk about mise-en-scene and say things like, “Opening night is not the end, but the beginning.” None of this would be strange, of course, if there weren’t a casino teeming with “deep Americans” just beyond the theater door.

‘The cherry on the cake’

Say this for Dion: At 34, she is a seemingly tireless show-biz schlepper, having toured for the bulk of her adolescent and adult life, marketing her image in the U.S., Europe and Asia -- not coincidentally the melting pot that constitutes Vegas tourism.

Several weeks before “A New Day” opened, Dion, wearing a silk pantsuit by Alexander McQueen, sat for a 20-minute interview in the bedroom of a Caesars suite that featured Grecian columns, an indoor Jacuzzi and a butler. The mammoth, marble-floored living room had been converted into a TV studio, with Team Celine lighting people and camera crews.

It was just another three hours of Dion’s life -- a promotional blitz in an ornate setting that could just as well be anywhere else, with 20 or so people running around, fussing over the business that is Celine.

She is the biggest-selling female singer in the U.S. since 1991, third overall behind Garth Brooks and the Beatles (worldwide, her sales are more than 150 million records). Since 1987, she has released seven albums in French and 10 in English.

“This is the cherry on the cake,” Dion said. “If I want to eat it, it’s now or never. And it doesn’t matter to me if this town is called Las Vegas or St. Tropez. People take what they want from everything, from everybody, from places they go. Don’t go to a place and be eaten by it. Take what you need from it.” She was leaning forward now. “Vegas gave me an opportunity. Caesars Palace gave me an opportunity, Franco Dragone gave me an opportunity. I can’t do a show like this and move. It’s technically impossible. It’s been given to me, the opportunity, I accepted it, and when I go home it doesn’t matter what this town is called. I’m home. It’s amazing for me that I can be stable for three years, I can put my milk in my fridge and it stays there. Can you believe I’m going to be able to watch a movie in my bed with my husband?”

Home, for the next three years, is Lake Las Vegas. The community of several hundred is one of those impossible places that becomes possible in the Nevada desert, a fabricated resort modeled after Italy’s Lake Como, with 10 miles of “shoreline,” championship golf courses and a Ritz-Carlton that opened three weeks ago. The “lake” of Lake Las Vegas is 320 acres, filled with water siphoned off from Lake Mead.

“There’s a life here in Las Vegas,” Dion said. “I think people think there’s Mafia here, girls and gambling. But there’s another side. There’s schools, churches.”

There are also neighbors who become alarmed when they hear you’re building a helipad on your property for the purpose of commuting to work each day. Dion says there’s nothing to worry about because she plans to make the 17-mile excursion from Lake Las Vegas to Caesars Palace by car.

She began her career unable to speak English, mimicking the lyrics to Olivia Newton-John songs in her bedroom. The youngest of 14 children from Charlemagne, Quebec, Dion has been in show business since age 12, when her family sent a demo tape of Celine to Angelil, a record producer and agent in Montreal.

At the time, Angelil was married with two children, and at work he had previously handled Canadian singer Ginette Reno. But it didn’t take long for Dion to become his pet project: Hers is the cloying fairy tale of the little girl who apparently grows up to get everything she wants -- international fame as a pop star, fancy hotel rooms wherever she goes, and the man of her dreams -- Angelil, who was 52 when he married Dion, then 26, at Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal. It is all laid out in Dion’s autobiography, “Celine Dion: My Story, My Dream.”

Did she regret never living on her own? “I had love, protection, attention, a good foundation. I’ve always been protected. But I love that, I’m used to that. It’s what gives me stability, security.”

In the familiar narrative of celebrity, that cocoon can become a prison, but Dion hardly seemed eager to entertain the notion. When the subject of the recent TV documentary on middle-aged curiosity Michael Jackson was broached, Dion went limp, saying she hadn’t seen it; this was the only question she didn’t field with pluck.

After her interview, Dion and Angelil sat down to eat. Dion tore into a slice of pizza and took the occasion to joke about ubiquitous tabloid rumors that she is anorexic. Angelil informed Dion that 2-year-old Rene-Charles, her Chrysler co-star, was taking two medications for a touch of bronchitis. The butler arrived at the table with a rich pasta dish for anyone who wanted it.

Dion gossip has often centered on her relationship with Angelil.

He hovers over everything in her life, a courtly-looking figure always in the wings, bald and with a neatly trimmed white beard, exuding an implicit authority. When Dion dropped out of public school as an adolescent, she went to see the principal. With her were her mother and her manager, Angelil. Early on, as a means of molding her raw talent, Angelil introduced Dion to Eddy Marnay, the French lyricist who had written for Edith Piaf, among others, and would write the lyrics for several of Dion’s early French recordings.

Two decades later, when Dion decided she wanted to do a show with Dragone, Angelil once again became her deal-maker. He got Caesars Palace to commit to building the theater, he said, and used personal connections to get Anschutz aboard as the main financial backer. He did this, he said, by going to Pierre Lacroix, general manager of the National Hockey League’s Colorado Avalanche and Angelil’s best friend. Lacroix is close to Tim Leiweke, president of the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings; Leiweke’s boss, Anschutz, had recently purchased the concert promotions firm Concerts West. Here was a chance to tap Vegas, with a “permanent” star.

They struck a deal over lunch at Dion and Angelil’s home in Jupiter, Fla., Angelil said. Dion, according to Leiweke, made the meal.

Recounting the deal in a 28th-floor high-roller suite that came with the Caesars deal, Angelil spoke in a low rasp, almost a whisper at times. An avid gambler, he patiently explained his system for blackjack (drawing out the sequence “1-3-2-5” on Caesars stationery to explain a betting pattern). Later, he went down to the sports book and put $900 on his best friend’s team, the Avalanche, who were playing that night in Pittsburgh. “He’s such a gambler, in the good way,” Dion said of Angelil. “Whatever way people want to see him, that’s their problem. I’ve been married to him and I’ve been with him for many, many years. He’s got this gambling thing that I don’t. It’s unfortunate that people can write whatever they want.”

Gambling on attendance

Outside the cocoon, on the Strip, there is only one question: Will Vegas eat Dion alive?

This will become clearer five months or a year and a half from now, when the media’s gone home and it’s 110 degrees out, and there are two more Cirque shows in town -- one at New York, New York and another at MGM Grand.

Some question the challenge of filling 20,000 seats a week at a time when the United States could go to war in Iraq and Vegas tourism is still affected by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks (according to the latest statistics from the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Bureau, tourism traffic in November 2002 was up slightly from the previous year, but still below levels set in November 2000).

“The capacity is absurd,” a source representing a rival show, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of attendance goals for “A New Day.” “I don’t think it’s realistic. It just seems crazy.”

Not everyone agrees. Although “A New Day” isn’t his show, Wynn falls back on his Vegas-as-ultimate-carnival-midway theory. It served him well in 1998, when he opened Bellagio and upped the ante on high-end Vegas entertainment. Wynn recalled watching a run-through of “O” with pianist Van Cliburn and Hollywood mogul Barry Diller. “It’s like being inside a Salvador Dali painting!” Wynn says Van Cliburn enthused, and afterward Wynn asked Diller what he thought he could charge for tickets.

“It doesn’t matter,” Wynn says Diller responded. “They have to come here to see it.”

Today, tickets for “O” average $120. The show is performed twice nightly, five nights a week, in an 1,800-seat theater. “What the hell is so new about this?” Wynn said to the issue of whether Dion can sustain sellouts at her prices. At “O,” “we’ve been doing 18,000 [a week] like breaking sticks.”

Several weeks ago, a column in the Las Vegas Sun archly noted that tickets for “A New Day” in March and April were quite available on Ticketmaster’s Web site. A Caesars spokesman disputed this, saying “90% of the 240,000 tickets placed on sale for the first three months” had been sold.

“We’re not stupid, so we did a lot of research. We didn’t go into Vegas blindly,” said Randy Phillips, CEO of AEG Live, Anschutz’s company. Several weeks before opening, there were few billboards on the Strip promoting Dion’s show, but Phillips was promising they’d pop up soon. “You have to stretch your marketing out, you have to keep it hot. You have to keep it running well.”

And finally there is Dion, the diva in the harness. In a previous era, there was Frank Sinatra at the Sands and Elvis at the Hilton, but even they dropped in for only weeks -- not years -- at a time.

Presley’s Vegas years are reconstructed in “Careless Love,” the second volume of Peter Guralnick’s two-book biography. As his drug use increased, his weight ballooned and his fame doubled back on him; Presley’s Hilton shows grew more bizarre, filled with the star’s stream-of-consciousness monologues.

It all sounds quaint now, a time when Vegas was still Vegas and fame was still fame. So perhaps it is a new day, as Chrysler and AEG and Park Place and Dion would have us believe. In her show, there is only one segment in which Dion will talk to her fans, and her comments are sure to be effusive and brief. Then she will get back to singing and dancing. And flying. “Out of nowhere, I start to go up,” she said. “There’s something breathtaking about it.”

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Times researcher Joan Wolff contributed to this story.