Similar to an acrobat in “Ka,” we fly freely with the figures:
$165 million: Cost of the “Ka” theater.
1,900: The theater’s seating capacity.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Las Vegas Sun: KA By The Numbers
Similar to an acrobat in “Ka,” we fly freely with the figures:
$165 million: Cost of the “Ka” theater.
1,900: The theater’s seating capacity.
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3 comments:
Cirque du Soleil is UNREAL with the scale of its productions. I can’t even believe having 300 production staff and having everything go smoothly. There must be so many memos! I wonder what the offices of these people look like. Are they all divided into quadrants? How many members are in each aspect of production? SO many questions. Something I find cool (in a safety way) is that the harness to cast member ratio is solidly 2:1, meaning that it is very unlikely that one harness is forced to be used throughout the duration of this monstrosity of a show. Also, this theatre seems crazy huge! Like, I can’t even imagine what to compare it to in my head beside Gillette Stadium back home. And I don’t even know how big that is, either. Another super awesome aspect of this production is the individual speakers in every seat. It must take such care in sound designing them so they are not intrusive to the experience, but solely enhancing.
It blows my mind that Cirque managed to pull together and invest in the KA theatre in the first place. The 160 million figure is just too much to even fathom, because of the immense risk that they were running had the show flopped. They must have really went all for it knowing that they would HAVE to make the show work, because they wouldn't just be able to throw all that money out (or maybe they would?). I just can't understand how they manage to not run a deficit at that show. I know that it's become a must-see on the Vegas landscape, but still, wow. It's also a little crazy to know that Cirque, other than Disney, is probably one of the only producing companies that could put this kind of show up, but yet they've kind of somewhat set a standard of sorts. It'll be interesting to see if any other companies manage to give them a run for their money.
I don’t know all that much about KA, or really any Cirque show, and most of what I know about it I learned at CMU from people talking about it. Reading this list of what goes into putting on a production of this scale is incredible, and I think it would be amazing to work on something on this scale and with this level of complexity. The fact that there are over 2000 speakers in the venue is really cool, and we were talking about it in intro to sound design just last week. One of the coolest things to me is the size of the cast compared to everything else. The number of harnesses, the number of props, the number of crewmembers… Crewmembers was actually something that I was thinking about just last night after Wolves because I was thinking about the size of the crew and had an “oh yeah” moment when I realized the crew was twice the size of the cast. I know that’s not an uncommon occurrence, but I still think it’s funny. Anyways, it’s so cool to see what went into this production, especially considering that it went up 10 years ago. I mean, if a Broadway show just opened and had these kinds of numbers there would be a bunch of green page articles about it and everyone would be marveling at it. This show is older than most people’s cars and it has a level of technical design that’s still awesome. 10 years later it’s still going strong.
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