‘Love’

Love" was the easiest of Cirque du Soleil's six missions on the Strip, except for that one detail: living up to the expectations of everyone who grew up with the Beatles.

First, the easy part. In all other Cirque titles, the music supports the action. Here, it's the opposite. After cutting a landmark deal with the Beatles organization, the band's entire catalog was handed over to cherry-pick and remix for a theater-in-the-round with 6,000 speakers. New details emerge from old favorites with stunning clarity.

With that head start, the company could have thrown a few psychedelic costumes on a few acrobats and rang up the gift-shop receipts for years to come.

But Cirque had dreams. From almost the day the French-Canadian outfit started building its empire on the Strip, it claimed each new title was a "theater show," not a "circus show." This was wishful thinking, of course. Ticket-buyers kept bringing the creators down from the sky with diamonds. Theater shows are a dime a dozen; inventive circus arts a scarce commodity.

With "Love," however, the Beatles provided the alchemy that gave the acrobatics purpose.

In the sexy rendition of "Something," a man is teased and tempted by four seductresses who literally float in and out of his reach. It's not quite ballet, not quite gymnastics, but that fantastic realm in between.

The hard part of this enterprise isn't attaching visuals to the songs, but images that live up to their history. Other works based on this music get bogged down in '60s symbolism, including Julie Taymor's movie "Across the Universe," which interpreted the Beatles catalog a year after "Love" opened in June 2006. Understandable, as the Beatles were key players of the era as well as its soundtrack.

Taymor is a better-known director than Cirque's Dominic Champagne (and her live staging of "The Lion King" will become Las Vegas competition this spring). But Champagne was able to incorporate many of the same themes with a lighter hand.

He narrows the scope to a few townspeople in Liverpool and to the Beatles themselves, and manages this without ever portraying the quartet as adult characters. Instead, the Fab Four hover around the edges as comic narrators -- and in one instance, as projected silhouettes -- via chatter lifted from their studio outtakes.

The opening "Because" strikes a wistful chord with the slow struggle of four rope-climbers -- everything is done in fours -- before confetti guns explode into "Get Back," revealing a rooftop party where the end is the beginning. Echoes of the final "Let It Be" concert shatter into images of war-torn London and the four boys who will be the Beatles.

The lads return several times in their bouncing ride on a four-poster bed, as they journey from the sadness of postwar Liverpool ("Eleanor Rigby") to the explosion of baby boomer enthusiasm ("I Want To Hold Your Hand") and the transformational era of flower power ("Revolution"). The costumes are grounded in period realism, giving the surrealistic elements even more impact.

The sequences where Cirque really blows it out were always good: in-line skaters topping vertical ramps to the strains of "Help," or the audience covered with parachute fabric for an inspired techno-sounding mash-up of "Within You Without You" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" by Giles Martin (son of Beatles producer George).

It was the groundwork that needed focus -- especially in the round -- and Champagne spent months refining the details. In my first review of "Love," I wrote about possible interpretations of the climactic "A Day in the Life." It still helps to know both John Lennon and Paul McCartney lost their mothers early, and that Lennon's was struck by a car.

The mother still floats in, ghostlike, to tuck the boy into bed. But after the headlights bear down on her, it is more clear she has, in fact, been killed. But that song leads into "Hey Jude," when the mourning boy is embraced by the community that will be given back the Beatles.

That's theater, and a company using its unique resources to realize it -- with a little help from its friends.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.