Beatles Fact of the Day

There's a new Cirque du Soleil show set to the music of The Beatles. It's called "LOVE", and it just opened this weekend at the Mirage in Las Vegas, the same venue that used to house Siegfried and Roy until "Monticore" tried to eat Roy. The whole place was renovated, and what went up was a $150 million custom-built theater with 360-degree seating. The house has 2000 seats, each equipped with a 6-speaker sound system including 2 in the headrests. It also has 2 state-of-the-art high-definition video projectors that are used to project images and video on 2 huge drop-down transparent sheets. The whole show consists of 60 performers doing their Cirque thing, and it promises to "bring the magic of Cirque du Soleil together with the spirit and passion behind the most beloved rock group of all time to create a vivid, intimate and powerful entertainment experience." That's what I like to hear.

The music isn't just your usual Beatles songs though, oh no. This is the first production to ever get the rights to The Beatles music from Apple Corps., those Nazi douchebags that insist on keeping it all to themselves. They need to give all the rights to Paul, Ringo, Yoko, Julian Lennon, and Olivia Harrison, and stop ruining it for the rest of us. Anyways, point is the Cirque show has the rights to the masters of every song, so all the music is as clear as it can get. It gets better though. Sir George Martin, producer of almost every Beatles album and probably the best objective judge of their talent and music, and his son Giles went into the famous Abbey Road Studios and mixed the masters of more than 100 songs for 2 years into what they call a "soundscape", including musical hybrids created from the elements of several Beatles songs. It's really cool, and you kind of have to hear it to get it. But for instance, the music and percussion from Tomorrow Never Knows are sprinkled with the vocals from Within You, Without You. It all sounds great. You can catch some snippets here, and they're planning on releasing the soundtrack, but not until later this year.

The whole idea of this project started back around 2000 when George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté became friends. They say they want this thing to run for years (10 is the goal right now), becoming one of those Vegas standards, and for God's sake I hope it does. I want to see this thing as many times as I can. Hopefully I can get to Vegas around my 21st birthday and catch it, because it looks great. And it's The Beatles, and you know how I am with them. Right now, if you're wondering what to get a guy for his 21st birthday, "LOVE" is all you need.