LOVE & THE BEATLES

The first review of Cirque du Soleil's £75 million extravaganza set to the songs of the Beatles. Charles Spencer reviews Love at Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas

Everything that was bold and beautiful, fresh and funny, sad and just plain silly about the Beatles comes together in this ravishing and almost indecently spectacular show. It's what old hippies call a head-trip, a constant 90-minute rush of dazzling sights and sounds.

Overpoweringly moving: Cirque du Soleil's Love

But for those of us who grew up with the Beatles - and the first record I ever bought was She Loves You, aged eight, in 1963 - this latest piece from Cirque du Soleil is also overpoweringly moving. For it achieves the apparently impossible, allowing you to hear the Beatles with fresh ears. At times you seem to be listening to the music of your childhood and youth as if for the first time.
This is partly a matter of technology, partly the genius of the Beatles' now octogenarian producer, George Martin, and his son, Giles. Working from the original master tapes, they have sensitively and imaginatively tweaked, remixed, and juxtaposed the music. Song blends into song, with echoes of other songs in the background. Somehow that ecstatic opening chord of A Hard Day's Night merges into the hard-rocking Get Back, while the eastern drone of Within You, Without You is accompanied by the drums from Tomorrow Never Knows.
And the sound is like a dream come true. Every seat in the 2,000-capacity, in-the-round auditorium has six speakers fitted into the head-rest. But the music also comes at you from all over the theatre. As a result you seem to be sitting right in the middle of the most fabulous pop music ever created. Even those who caught the Beatles in concert, or sat in on recording sessions, will never have heard the songs with such freshness and fidelity as this. The music seems new-minted, and even hits you'd played to death acquire new life.
Cirque du Soleil has spent some $130 million (£75 million) on the show, with two thirds of that astronomical budget going on the custom-built theatre - there are no plans to put the show on anywhere but Vegas. And I'm happy to report that they have curtailed some of their more tiresome tendencies.
After years of grumbling about the hideously unfunny clowns, what a delight it is to report that the company has finally given the blighters a rest. And whereas most of the Cirque shows we've seen in England combine spectacular climaxes with long barren stretches when nothing much happens, here the eye as well as the ear is constantly dazzled and diverted.
There are trippy animations on huge screens as well as thrilling aerial acrobatics and the most spectacularly daring trampoline and roller skate acts you'll ever see. There are also passages of tremendous beauty, like the moment when the auditorium is filled with hundreds of blue and white lights and a trapeze artist suddenly swoops through the air to the ecstatic sounds of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. This was one of several sequences, brilliantly marrying sight and sound, when my eyes filled with tears.
The two Martins have also put together sound collages of the Beatles' youthful studio banter that seem terribly poignant now that two are dead and the survivors in their sixties, and the show's deviser and director, Dominic Champagne, doesn't shirk the darker side of the Beatles. It's made crystal clear that drugs played a big part in the creation of their later music, and the death of John Lennon's mother Julia, which contributed so much to the raw pain that lurks in his greatest songs, is staged in a manner that is both spectacular and deeply affecting.
But what the show, in which characters like Sergeant Pepper, Eleanor Rigby and Lady Madonna haunt the stage, captures most magically is the optimism and generosity that the Beatles represented. And when the production ends, inevitably, with All You Need is Love, this hackneyed song suddenly feels like a passionate protest against the bellicosity that currently grips the US administration.
The freakiest moment of all, though, comes as you stumble wide-eyed and full of joy from the show, only to find yourself in the permanent twilight of the casino, with gamblers joylessly feeding the slot machines like the living dead. All you need is cash…