The next show to go dark was in Cirque’s Las Vegas stronghold that August: Viva Elvis, a tribute to the King at the Aria Resort & Casino, made so little money that the hotel’s owner asked Cirque to pull the plug. Another show, Zaia, in Macau, closed less than two months later. Dwindling ticket sales and attenuated performance schedules following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami had forced the company to close its Tokyo Disney show, Zed, on the last day of 2011. Cirque’s founder, Guy Laliberté-once a busker, now the billionaire head of the world’s largest theatrical-production company-was elated and relieved. The audience gave the show a standing ovation. Michael Jackson One, a clamorous, laser- and video-laced tribute to the King of Pop featuring street dancers from seven nations, played to a premiere audience packed with celebrities ranging from Justin Bieber to Spike Lee. That same night, two blocks south of Kà’s stage, Cirque opened its eighth and newest show on the Strip, at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. But she was too far away, and falling too fast. One of them lunged toward Guillot-Guyard, reaching out his hands to try to catch her. ![]() The performers were sheltered by no such illusions. Even the laws of gravity can seem to have no meaning. She fell face downward, in full sight of several fellow performers, who were stranded in midair, hanging by their wires, and in full sight of the audience, some of whom had no idea, at first, that they were witnessing an actual accident-because it is the nature of a Cirque du Soleil spectacle to make audiences believe that anything is possible. In the next couple of seconds, Sarah Guillot-Guyard-who was born in Paris and was a graduate of the Fratellini Academy, a circus-arts school in Saint-Denis who had been married to another Kà acrobat, named Mathieu Guyard, and with him had a daughter and a son who, in her off-hours, taught circus acrobatics to children in a Vegas strip mall and who, being French, would sneak cigarettes outside the stage door sometimes, and mistranslate English phrases sometimes (“little by little,” to her, was “small by small”)-in those few seconds, Guillot-Guyard fell to her death from a height of 94 feet. For the performers, it is a job, and they do it like troupers, twice a night, five nights a week. For the audience, it is a wonder, as if the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had come to life before their eyes. As one, the Spearmen, all of them, fall upward. The fight ends when the Forest People, at the bottom of the stage, hurl the Spearmen, at the top of the stage, off the battlefield. The wire runs up to a complex configuration of equipment that enables the performer to leap, twist, flip, and fly while chasing others back and forth-that is, up and down the length of the vertical stage. ![]() Each warrior is played by an acrobat who wears a harness attached to a wire rope. ![]() In the show’s climactic battle scene, two groups of warriors-the Forest People (good guys) and the Spearmen (bad guys)-face off on a stage that slowly tilts from horizontal to almost vertical, which allows the audience to see the fight as if from above. Much of the show’s budget of at least $165 million-more than double the cost of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the most expensive Broadway production ever mounted-was spent on technology to produce astonishing visual effects. The Cirque du Soleil show called Kà opened in 2005 at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas, as the most expensive theatrical production in history.
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