A beautiful young man sails over the green earth, briefly alighting, then aloft again. Next a man and a woman materialize, Adam and Eve without the ! snake, in a stately, rapturous dance that hints at what passion was like before guilt. Finally, six animal-angels drop from the sky and soar back into it, gliding, pirouetting, seeming to meditate in midair before they swoop back, swing down and holds hands, in a little aero-dynamic miracle of celestial accord.
The creatures are only human, of course -- just acrobats, dancers, trapeze artists, doing their lithe, aerodynamic thing, proving that bodies can be pliable sculptures and that gravity is just another rule to be broken. The show is Mystere, one of two new extravaganzas from the Montreal-based troupe Cirque du Soleil. And the scene is, of all places, the Treasure Island hotel in Las Vegas, temple of the great American crapshoot.
But when Cirque comes to town, all entertainment bets are off. In four acclaimed tours of North America, the company has reinvented the traditional circus, updating it with a story line and baroque costumes while returning it to its origins as a home for spellbinders and spellbreakers. Mystere is as posh as any Vegas spectacular: 72 performers, including scantily clad high steppers of the show-girl persuasion and a huge stage full of gaudy illusion. This isn't Siegfried and Roy; it's Siegfried-times-Roy. Yet Mystere has the old Cirque majesty, the theatrical buoyancy, plus a more surreal appeal of its own. If someone were to dream of a cathedral to the goddesses of earth and rebirth, and then dare to build it on the Vegas strip, this would be it.
Mystere is just one of three Cirque shows on view this season. Saltimbanco, which wowed Americans on both coasts in 1992-93, opens Nov. 2 in Montreal, after a six-month Tokyo engagement. And Alegria, the troupe's newest touring show, opens next week on the Santa Monica Pier, a few miles from Los Angeles; in 1995 it will play New York City and other Easterly venues. In all these towns Cirque du Soleil will be a hot ticket, and a fairly pricey one ($39.50 for Alegria's best seat, $52 for Mystere's). As the shows proliferate, as casino owners and movie moguls compete to showcase Cirque, the artists who founded the company and still run it have to decide how quickly and broadly they want to expand. Metaphorically speaking, Cirque Ltd. is poised to become Cirque Inc.
In just 10 years the outfit has expanded from a band of Montreal street performers to a $40 million-a-year corporation. Cirque's first U.S. show cost about $200,000; Alegria cost $3 million; Mystere, $7 million. Since the beginning of last year, the number of employees has doubled, but hardly fast enough to accommodate the artistic and entrepreneurial itch of the creators, who have devised and fulfilled two five-year plans, and are launched on a third. They are building a $10 million "creation studio," an elaborate rehearsal space, in Montreal. Now a television series is planned. Perhaps there will be another permanent site, in Vancouver -- if Steve Wynn, the Treasure Island owner who put up $26 million for a theater designed to Cirque's specifications, gets approval from Canadian officials to build a casino there. Next year Saltimbanco invades Europe.