Hollywood stars align for Cirque du Soleil’s Guy Laliberte

A few days ago at Hollywood & Highland, a smooth-scalped man in a black leather jacket, jeans and sneakers got a red-carpet treatment that royalty might envy.

Not one, but two, L.A. City Council members took turns gushing over him. His fellow countryman, the director James Cameron, praised the honoree as a theatrical magus who conjures “living dreams,” populated with aerialists, acrobats and clowns that are actually amusing. Then, as a beaming Hollywood Chamber of Commerce representative looked on, Guy Laliberté, the press-shy billionaire founder and CEO of Cirque du Soleil, stepped forward to unveil his and Cirque’s shiny new star, the 2,424th on the Walk of Fame.

The VIP theatrics were telling. On July 21, the Montreal-based Cirque will pull the drapes off its latest high-flying extravaganza, the Hollywood-themed “Iris.” The new show has a 10-year contract to perform at the Kodak Theatre in the Hollywood & Highland Center, which annually hosts the Academy Awards ceremony but has had trouble filling its cavernous 3,400-seat enclosure year-round.

Written and directed by French dancer-choreographer Philippe Decouflé, who staged the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics, with music by Danny Elfman, “Iris” is shaping up both as a valentine to the movie industry and a mash note to the city that, perhaps more than any outside Canada, has put Cirque’s blue- and gold-striped tent on the global map. Over the years, Laliberté said, Cirque has conducted “a love affair” with L.A., and in an interview he spoke of how working on “Iris” has fired up the group’s creative juices.

“This opportunity for Cirque du Soleil to pay tribute to an industry that has an amazing history, we were like little kids in a candy store,” said the 51-year-old impresario, who likes to depict Cirque, one of the world’s most lucrative entertainment brands, as a humble troupe of hard-working acrobats, and still regards himself as the scrappy Quebec street busker he started out as 30 years ago. Never mind that he’s now one of the world’s 500 or 600 richest people, a recipient of the Order of Canada (his nation’s top honor), anda top-tier philanthropist in environmental causes.

So far, Laliberté and his colleagues have revealed few details about “Iris” ( pronounced, in the French-Canadian mode, more like ee-rees than eye-ris). But they acknowledge that it will reference specific films and characters, and that the design will include projected images. “There’s so much history in [the] cinema industry that was very inspiring,” Laliberté said.

City officials, retailers and tourism promoters hope that Cirque’s Hollywood residency will provide a major infusion of visitors and cash to the theater and the shops and restaurants that surround it. “Iris,” with a cast of 75 performers and a cost of $100 million, including theater renovation, is contracted for a minimum of 368 performances a year. Cirque plans to use a roughly 2,500-seat configuration by closing off part of a balcony, and is excavating 45 feet under the Kodak stage to accommodate its sprawling sets. Tickets will run from $43 to $133, and higher for VIP packages.

The theater is part of the Hollywood & Highland Center retail complex, whose current owner, CIM Group, bought it in 2004. One of the center’s biggest boosters, Council member Eric Garcetti, whose district encompasses the Babylonian-motif mall, declared at the Walk of Fame ceremony that “Iris” would draw about 2 million visitors annually and create hundreds of jobs, and “not just for the folks in the show.”

Those are big expectations for the big-top ensemble, which almost single-handedly reinvented Las Vegas entertainment by mounting seven shows in custom-built theaters along the Strip. It also has full-time productions running in Tokyo; Macau, China; and Orlando, Fla. Yet another new Cirque spectacle, “Zarkana,” is scheduled to open a 15-month engagement in June at New York’s Radio City Music Hall and a new touring show, “ Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour” will launch in October.

Sounding purposeful but relaxed, Laliberté, who oversees every Cirque project, said he’s not concerned about his company growing overextended. Cirque now employs 5,000 people worldwide, including 1,200 performing artists from nearly 50 different countries. “At the end, we live or die from our public, they’re the ones who will decide,” Laliberté said. “And at this point they’re still coming, they still want more.”

As for L.A., he said, Cirque has met big-time challenges here before. Founded in 1984 by a tatterdemalion band of jugglers, stilt-walkers and fire-belchers, Cirque had performed across Canada by the mid-1980s and was scouting out potential new venues, preferably in a year-round warm-weather market. The troupe made its U.S. debut in Los Angeles in 1987.

Laliberté remembers having to erect 15-foot tall security fencing around Cirque’s tent when it was first pitched in Little Tokyo, and the uncertainty surrounding the first show. “We were part of the Los Angeles Art Festival,” he recalled. “The deal I had with them was they wanted us, but they didn’t have the money to pay our production. So the deal we made we said, OK, we’ll take the risk, the financial risk, which back then was basically every penny we had in our pocket. There’s that famous movie, it’s named [‘To] Live and Die in L.A.’ That was really our story back then.”

On opening night the temperature was sizzling, so as audience members took their seats a Cirque clown sprayed them with water. The gag went over well, the show got a standing ovation, and the box office lines grew so long that Cirque canceled an Australian tour in order to stay in L.A. The Cirque tent has since been pitched many times by Santa Monica Pier. “It was a big tornado for us because we’re a little kid, a little frog from Montreal, coming in here in one of the big entertainment capitals of the world.”

Until now, Cirque has largely resisted Hollywood’s embrace. At one point, Laliberté said, he came within minutes of signing a deal with Columbia Pictures to make a feature film about Cirque’s history. But when the formal announcement was about to be made at a star-studded gathering, he discovered that he’d been shunted into a back-row seat in his own tent to make room up front for the Hollywood hot-shots.

“I called my lawyer. I said, ‘Cut off the deal.’ Because then I realized that for them they were just trying to buy Cirque du Soleil and control it and not respecting where we were coming from. It was probably the best nondeal ever to have happened. And from that moment until now we always have kept creative control and never gave up all that.”

Laliberté said he required those same terms from Disney before agreeing to partner with it on the “La Nouba” show at Walt Disney World Resort. He also insisted on meeting face to face with Disney’s then-chief executive Michael Eisner before he signed on. “The only thing we gave up — we promised that there would not be nudity in the show. Fair enough!”

The son of a public relations executive and a mother who worked as a nurse and played piano, Laliberté frustrated his parents’ wishes by passing up law or medical school in order to live and perform on the streets. There, he said, he learned lessons that continue to serve him.

“When you have friends on the street you have that bonding where you watch [his] back and he watches yours,” Laliberté said. “And this had built up a very strong value of what I apply in Cirque du Soleil. The other thing is intuition. On the street you have a fraction of a second to decide if you trust somebody or not. This is the difference between a great friend or a knife in your back.”

Spoken like a man with the necessary skills to live, or even thrive, in Hollywood.

reed.johnson@latimes.com