Friday, November 02, 2007
Cirque du Soleil Premieres a 'Wintuk' Wonderland at Madison Square Garden
Yahoo! News: "The winter-themed, acrobat-filled, spectacle-infused world premiere will run through Jan. 6, 2008, with annual return visits planned. In recent years, the venue found holiday-season success with productions of A Christmas Carol, Peter Pan and Annie. The show hopes to compete with other family-friendly holiday theatricals that pop up annually in Manhattan - for example, Broadway's How the Grinch Stole Christmas or the Radio City Christmas Spectacular."
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7 comments:
I feel very renewed that a producing organization is developing the concept of the 'Christmas Show.' Its certainly a running joke in the theatre about how many productions of 'A Christmas Carol' a person could do a lifetime, but its time for a change.
Bringing the very modern Cirque, in a classic season show calendar slot and with the winter theme, i imagine will be an incredible sucess.
I would say that the target audience are the people who have always seen the Christmas Show at MSG, and have also wanted to experience Cirque, Now its the time.
Now, I still do really want to see this. But I was talked out of it by my Uncle who has worked in the WaMu theatre. It's extraordinarily small for something with the expected scale of a Cirque show, and he said that a money-making holiday show isn't what I want to see for my first Cirque show. I still kind of disagree and may go and get a $30 seat, but we'll see.
What I really wanted to comment about though was that I was completely unaware as to the origins of Cirque until Liz came into our class and talked about how basically she was the one who got Cirque out of Quebec and as far as I'm concerned the reason for their insane success now. Brilliant.
Exciting as this is it almost makes me nervous. they are going to add singing and puppetry? i am in favor of both art forms but i just don't want to see them get muddled in a big mess of holiday extravaganza. cirque has been doing just fine with only their acrobatics to go on. i just don't know if they are biting off more than they can chew. if they can pull it off then i think it will be thrilling but with all the changes, the size of the arena, the story line, the singing and puppetry, I'm worried that audiences wont see the classic cirque productions they expect and get upset. i hope not. i hope it's phenomenal because its the only Christmas season production i want to see.
Like every Cirque show that I want to go to, I want to go to have the experience of the wonderful costumes and everything that is so Cirque.
Its good that they want to do something new. It could just be like any successful Cirque show, if not better. Thats the stamp of Cirque on it to me.
In response to the comment about the small venue, i think that viewers will go to this cirque show with a little bit of a smaller expectations of size. As opposed to the big top shows and the shows in places like vegas where land is abundant and people expect big venues, i don't think new yorkers and visitors to new york expect big tops and monumental circus venues to be in manhattan.
also, this is not the first cirque show with singing, many of the shows have pre-recorded and live singing and it is a huge success.
It's amazing to witness the kind of profit christmas shows can still make these days, performing the same show over and over again. However I think there is still a demographic that doesn't see the spectacle of "The Rockettes" or "A Christmas Carol". This is the show for them. A new and refreshing approach to the speactacle that is winter. I think this show will be very popular in the future.
I bet it is a lot easier to rig in Madison Square Garden than it would be in a tent. But I dunno, the tent atmosphere is fun. I agree that it does make more sense for the show to be in an actual indoor "theater" space in NYC than in a tent. The theme sounds like fun. I'd be awesome if they made it snow. Real snow. Inside. Disney did it, except the machine had problems and large chunks of ice knocked guests unconscious.
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