Luxe Life Blog

Mystere celebrates 15 years in Sin City with a special gift from new T.I. owner

Posted January 23, 2009 • 3:40 p.m.

The cast of Cirque du Soleil's Mystere at Treasure Island.

Photo: Tomasz Rossa

Cirque du Soleil starts the official celebration of 15 years of its debut Las Vegas show Mystere this weekend, and Treasure Island’s new owner, Phil Ruffin, wants to keep it running for another five years in addition to its three years on its current contract!

Ruffin says that, even after 15 years, occupancy remains at 85 percent year-round in the 1,629-seat theater, and Phil wants it there until at least 2016. He told my colleague Steve Freiss at www.StripPodcast.com that he hopes to meet with Cirque officials next week during 15th anniversary festivities to lock it all into place!

Incidentally, Steve tipped me off that Phil says he’s doing everything he can to buy T.I. from MGM Mirage for $775 million by April 1, sooner than the original June 1 date first noted when the deal was announced.

Now in its second decade, Mystere still keeps audiences spellbound with top-tier athletes and acrobats. Since opening, more than 9 million people have watched the cast of 75 from 19 countries perform. It’s a story of a jaw-dropping journey through a human circus loaded with amazing acrobatics, mystical music and cunning choreography. Beyonce, Ricky Martin, Bruce Willis and 50 Cent are among the superstars who’ve seen Mystere.

The T.I. facility was the first custom-built theater for Cirque in Las Vegas, and it opened on Christmas Day 1993. Until then, Cirque relied solely on touring shows. The circus stage is split into four sections and goes up or down separately at any speed. It is a 120-foot by 70-foot by 80-foot-high operation and was the first time Cirque had ever built on such a scale. A giant slinky system of cylinders moves like a coil for the movement of the stage because it’s impossible to build downwards into the Nevada desert.

Mystere breaks the mold of conventional theater with its technical twists and vivid lighting sequences created 15 years ago and still regarded as cutting edge today. The show has 1,800 fixed lights with 800 different cues. In 90 minutes, the lights are changed 800 times, burning 30,000 watts of power per performance, enough to light up 600 homes around the clock! The audio system uses 94,700 watts of power for the 78 custom speakers.

The costume shop is the largest crew of Mystere and runs two shifts from 9 a.m. until 1 a.m. with full-time stitchers, crafts people, and people who work on everything from shoes to heads. It takes about 40 daily loads of laundry to keep the costumes looking clean, and some costumes have as many as 2,500 hand-applied sequins!

Critics and fans have marveled at the opening cube act, which symbolizes the first man to conquer the world. The finale is inspired by men’s gymnastics high bar, with a team of 14 men from all over the world, mainly from Russia, Romania and the Ukraine. But of all the acts that thrill, the top has to be the Korean plank. I asked Red Bird performer Ross Gibson to explain it for me: “It was an act originally conceived in Korea. Cirque adapted it to get the specifics for circus shows. There’s a seesaw action where a performer stands on one end and then is catapulted 20 feet high into the air when another performer jumps on the opposite end. You have to land back and be precise so you send the next performers upwards. There’s a lot of trust in the performers. You don’t want to land off to the side because that’s a very hard stage!”

In another amazing sequence, the athletes do a series of backflips clocked at 30 mph! Said Ross: “That’s one of the arts of Cirque. It’s to make an incredibly difficult acrobatic act look very simple as if anyone can do it. But it takes years of training in that specific sport, whether it’s gymnastics, trampoline or synchronized swimming. Once you come to Cirque, it’s even more years of training to put the arts from a sports form onto a stage. Cirque finds a very good way to mix sports and the arts and to make it look as effortless as it does every single day.

“We still rehearse every day before the show, and often in between for 90 minutes between the shows. It’s very important that our senses are very aware. The only way to do that is to make sure we’ve trained for an hour to perform exactly right on stage.”

Director Franco Dragone was once asked to describe Mystere and its unequaled success as the original Cirque show: “Mystere is a celebration of life. From the genesis of the first life forms to the rise of human civilizations, the driving force has always been the vital spark of life, throbbing, struggling, reproducing and weaving through death and rebirth. From the infinitesimally microscopic to the infinitely vast, from the most majestic to the most terrifying, from the most fragile to the most powerful, all is the making of life.

“Mystere is a voyage to the very heart of life where past, present and future merge, and all our emotions converge. Mystere is the enigma of time, the bearer of hopes and dreams but also of tragedy. It is above all the remembrance of time past, memories of life unfolding, following its course and ultimately surviving against all odds.”

With all the skills and money that have gone into the production, there’s one unknown secret for its success: a bottle of Coca-Cola. Ross let me in on the secret: “It’s now the famous Coca-Cola stage. We add Coke to the floor just to make sure that the grip is sticky enough. We don’t want to slip and slide on stage, so it adheres to our footwear just right! There’s a lot of bounce in the stage, as well, so when we tumble, we also want to be able to get upright properly every time!”

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