the Way of the Showman
Philosophical and esoteric perspectives from a modern day Showman.
Each season is different in its approach. S1 is essays. S2 is one book length attempt at Understanding Showmanship, S3 is conversations with remarkable Showfolk. The brand new Season 4 explores the relationship between Showmanship and Play.
The host, Captain Frodo, internationally renowned circus performer, director, writer, husband and dad lays out, in great detail, his practical performance philosophy for performers who seek to deepen the conversation with their audiences and themselves. You can find him, and more of his writing at: www.thewayoftheshowman.com
the Way of the Showman
132 - Mystere Unveiled: Exploring the Art of Cirque - Jay Gilligan & Captain Frodo explores Cirque du Soleil's first Las Vegas show 2 of 4
Step into the enchanting world of "Mystere," where the lines between circus, theater, and artistry blur into an unforgettable experience. In this episode, we unfold the remarkable story behind one of the Cirque du Soleil's most iconic productions, exploring how it reshaped modern entertainment. Listen as we discuss its innovative approach to storytelling, the emotional depth of its performances, and the sheer magic that captivates audiences worldwide.
Join us as we dive deep into the show's creative vision, led by Franco Dragone and his team, who broke barriers to redefine the circus landscape. Mystere invites viewers on a journey, appealing to the senses and challenging preconceived notions of performance art through stunning visuals and dynamic storytelling. We share insights on the unique challenges performers face within the show, discovering how anonymity and collective identity play a crucial role in their craft.
The episode also touches on the impact of technology in enhancing audience interaction and expectations of live performances. We reflect on the show's enduring legacy, how it paved the way for future productions, and its evolution over the years.
Whether you're a circus enthusiast or new to the world of performance arts, you won't want to miss this fascinating exploration! You'll gain valuable insights into the deeper meanings woven into every act. Be part of this journey and share your own experiences with us! Don't forget to subscribe or leave a review!
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Greetings fellow travelers and welcome to the way of the showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo and I will be your host and your guide along the way, and it is excellent to have you along the way with me right now and, I hope, be your host and your guide along the way. And it is excellent to have you along the way with me right now and I hope to have it in the future. Therefore, if you like this right now, click, follow, click, subscribe on whatever podcast app puller downer that you have in your hand or on your computer right now. That would be really awesome Because you don't want to miss any more of these mysterious obsessions. As we explore Cirque du Soleil, that I am in it sometimes and that Jay has seen it more than what's cool, to admit, we are delving further and deeper into what Mystere is and into the thoughts that me and Jay Gilligan have about it, but, of course, the expert here is the man that has seen it 84 times live. He saw it within months of opening. As we're going to explore a little bit today, I believe, and yeah, without further ado, because we already talk a lot about everything, then I'd just like to get cracking straight into the episode with Jay Gilligan and the Myster Obsessions, part 2. We are back for our second talk about Myster.
Speaker 1:I was just listening to you and me talk and I loved just this beginning of where you are sketching out where you were at in the late 80s, early 90s, because I was in Norway then and in an absolute vacuum, so I came to these things later, probably not until I don't know when it was, but I saw my first live Cirque du Soleil show in 1996. Oh, wow, so I had seen it somehow before. And which show was that? That was Saltenbanka Great. Me and a friend who were doing street shows found out that Cirque du Soleil was playing in Belgium and we had been performing in Copenhagen on the street and we went, went. They are playing there at this time. So we drove to Belgium to see the show and and it felt huge. It's like it was amazing, like like a big event in our lives. We both loved what they were doing and it was absolutely the biggest thing.
Speaker 1:But maybe because I came from norway and I didn't know anyone and and whatever it, I, my thing, was on the outside looking at it like as if I was looking at a hollywood movie. Yeah, I was really deeply into horror film at that time just before and I've been interested specifically kind of in splatter movies with lots of effects and blood and all this. And I wanted to write my last year assignment about extreme visually graphic horror film, splatter movies, yeah, with effect based movies, special effects and stuff, and we had made some of those little things. But I never in my mind dreamt that I could make a movie like um star wars or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I could just about imagine that I could make something as evil dead by sam raimi or bad taste by peter jackson their first movies whereas they're just within a large production of what we thought we could do with whatever but when it came to circus and magic and stuff and I would not even know how to approach these kinds of shows my thing was so folk circus like my folk circus, with my dad doing magic we went into folk circus doing street shows and we were doing street shows and we used the money that we made on the street to travel to see this show. But I never imagined that I could be in it. So it was really exciting to hear it from you who was in North America, which was, of course, a key component. This happened in a continent that I had never been to and wouldn't be on until for another 10 years.
Speaker 1:I saw a show in 1996, went to Las Vegas first time in 2006. Okay, did I? Yeah, I did, yeah, great. No, didn't go to Las Vegas in 2006,. Went to America for the first time? Okay, okay, to New York, 2006. Okay, yeah, to perform. So it was really nice to hear you just talk about how you were there and your duo was pulled apart. So it was great to have that personal way into it.
Speaker 2:I mean that's going to come up again later. But this idea of what you were just talking about, of, oh, I could never make the movie Star Wars, I mean I was. You know, I was a teenager when we're talking about Nouvelle Experience and this and that and Saltimbanco and Mystere and all those things, and I didn't understand at all how the world worked. But I did understand the agency I had in my own practice to learn new juggling tricks and to invent new patterns and to, also on a very small scale. I was performing when I was. You know, I started performing when I was eight years old, so I had opportunities to express myself on stage and I had. I know I had a little bit of a process around how I would, how I would make my performances like I could. I knew I had the power in myself to present my show how I would make my performances Like I knew. I had the power in myself to present my show how I wanted to.
Speaker 2:But that was a very limited scope of understanding. And then when I would look at Cirque du Soleil, like Nouvelle Experience, I mean they have their own tent, they have their own. You know how many people are in the show. You know 40 people are in the show or something. It was incomprehensible to me. But I was also conflating a lot of stuff into each other where I was just like, well, I just need to practice more. Cause, I think the one thing I could do, right, I could practice more, I could. I could, I could learn more skills or more tricks or something. Um, but I didn't know how to necessarily like you know, necessarily like you know negotiate a contract or balance a spreadsheet or make a budget or gather a team like all these very important into woven into the fabric of how do you make a show with a tent and 40 people, right, that just didn't come. I couldn't comprehend it. Um, still to this day I I can comprehend the mechanics of how that works. I would not have it inside of me to start a company and to be able to go out and make a company like that.
Speaker 2:And just a little sidetrack, just to say, when I was young, my dream was to have a company. For many years that was kind of the goal of a lot of people, I think in America in my generation was like, once you get big enough, you would maybe start to have a little troop of performers that you would all make a show together and kind of make a company, and that was definitely a dream for many, many years. And then at some point, that fell away where it was like, no, I don't want to have a company, I want to, uh, just do my own work and collaborate. I mean, obviously I collaborate with a million people like you, but I don't have my own core company of you know of an office full of people and a whole creative team and a whole bunch of employees. I don't have that.
Speaker 2:And you know famously all of the all of the seven fingers, because I worked with them and that's like literally having seven different bosses and, one by one, they all took me aside at some point. Bosses and one by one, they all took me aside at some point, was just like the biggest mistake we ever made was to make a company, meaning that they were from their side. The grass is always greener. Oh, what a challenge it is to have a company. And don't you fall into the same trap we fell into, whereas I'm on the other side of the fence and I'm looking to their company and being like you have a team, you have camaraderie, you have, you can support each other and I'm here all alone and I'm lonely sometimes and I'm struggling and I don't have all the skills necessary, so I don't know. There's always that kind of reciprocal view.
Speaker 2:And the other thing, um, while we're talking about it cause I think this is fun and also crazy and I never told you, but when I was a teenager I was so obsessed with practicing that for me the payoff of all the practice wasn't doing the show. The payoff was I got to do something new. I got to learn a new skill or make a new pattern or create something, and for me that was fun and going to do the show was fun, but it wasn't as fun as in rehearsal. The show was never as fun as being in rehearsal. The first moment of rehearsal, when you first discover that new trick, you go, oh, there's a new idea I never thought of before. That's the moment that was gold. And then after that you had to work. You had to work to make it real and to make it you could catch it every single time.
Speaker 2:So many times when I was in high school, 17 years old, I mean, I was doing shows for like $600 a pop, which you know, this is back in the early 90s and today I would do a show for $600. Absolutely that's not a bad pay, even in today's market, and so I would. It was like a half hour show. Okay, I was doing, I was selling a half hour show locally in Ohio or, you know, around my parents house. I would just drive out and do the show or whatever for private family events or for Cub Scout banquet or Halloween parade or whatever, right, and many times I remember now I was in high school I would get a phone call and I had. I had an ad in the phone book it was the Yellow Pages, which was the commercial the commercial phone book.
Speaker 1:Santini's Magic Show was also in the Yellow Pages.
Speaker 2:There you go and that's how you marketed yourself. And I would get a phone and you see, you have your phone number. I would get a phone call at my mom, jay, the phone's for you and I would answer the phone and they're like hey, yeah, so we're doing a, you know, a baseball banquet for our team. You know, next Friday at 7 PM Can you come do the show? You know we have a budget of whatever, you know 500 bucks. And I would frequently be like no, no, thanks, because in my mind I'm like, oh, if I do that show the day before, I'm going to have to practice the show and that means I can't do new stuff and I'm going to have to drive there, and then my Friday practice time is gone and I might be more tired on Saturday. I can't practice as much that day. I would just turn down gigs, man.
Speaker 1:You're a practice junkie. And you were into the new as opposed to into a crafted experience that happens between you and an audience.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, well, I was into that, but I was more into the other thing, right, yeah, but that's what I mean. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like you were more into the new than you were into the experience of it, or whatever.
Speaker 2:So now, looking, I mean, and especially in the recent years following that time period, I would kick myself frequently when I had to pay my rent and I was just like man four years ago, I wish I would have taken more of those gigs, could have, could have saved some money. But uh, no, it's just funny, though right like to think about today, to be like, if you get a phone call for a show and you're just like, no, no, if I, if I go to do a show for you Friday night, like I can't practice then and so that's kind of fun. But that was, that was the mentality I was in at the time when I was encountering all these things of, of Nouvelle Experience, and and there's another really important cultural thing to weave in here that we have to mention, which is that, uh, I was a juggler. I started off doing unicycling and then I did juggling. That was my identity, and if you dared say I did circus, you were wrong.
Speaker 2:I did not do circus because I was in America and in America we wanted to get away from the circus. The circus was Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey. It was red noses on clowns and sawdust and elephants, and so that's why Cirque du Soleil was so appealing? Right, because they were counterculture to that circus image, that's what they were marketing themselves as, that's how they were spreading their awareness around. And so that really spoke to me, right, because me and all my friends, we didn't want to be circus, because that wasn't a thing in america, whereas I think in europe, for example, there's more of a lineage of the history of circus. I mean, countries here are older than the american country. Uh, you know, as a nation, and so then you have a more of a connection to your history.
Speaker 2:And clearly, when I came to europe, uh, eventually it was really clear oh, I'm doing circus. Yeah, like, juggling is part of circus. That's the circus, is the larger umbrella. Then you start to learn about philip astley, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you go, oh, yeah, I'm doing juggling, which is, whether I like it or not, is undeniably under the umbrella of the genre of something called circus. That's just how the world works. Yeah, but when I was in america, in ohio, growing up as a teenager, yeah, it's like's like saying no, I'm a painter, I'm not an artist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like where you go. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, Maybe you have some point. Yeah, but to anyone else. Or my famous story of walking with my friend and meeting someone and they go oh so, who's your friend? Oh, yeah, it's so-and-so.
Speaker 2:And do you also do circus?
Speaker 1:no, I do neo vaudeville right, right, okay, and I say he does circus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly sure because it's like, yeah, anyway, but yeah, yeah, fair enough. No, but that that was a real, that was really woven into the fabric of life at the time of this idea of, like this american idea of, at least with my circle of friends, we're not doing circus, we're doing joggling, that's something else. We're doing unicycling, that's something else, we're doing unicycling, that's something else. It wasn't sports, but it wasn't circus in the American traditional image. And then Cirque du Soleil comes along and they're like, hey, we're not doing, we're doing circus, but it's not American traditional image.
Speaker 2:And I'm just like huh, wait, what Right, and that really spoke to me and so I couldn't. But but again, I couldn't kind of comprehend the leap between where I was and what they were doing. But it was very attractive, kind of what you were saying about yourself making films and star wars and whatever. And if we can kind of dive since we're already there, we could dive into that a little bit deeper and this idea that when mystere came around we already mentioned previously of like the risk they were taking, that it was the first permanent show and and the first permanent theater, custom-built theater, and all this big scale circus show in vegas yeah, and they had all the completely breaking new ground for what was acceptable performance or what was possible to do as performance a bunch of unknowns.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a bunch of unknowns they were stepping into the mysteries, into the unknown and so we can talk a little bit more concretely than about what the show actually is.
Speaker 2:But also I want to frame that with this idea of not understanding how the world was back then, like I mean from today's view, looking backwards, like even though I lived through it, you lived through it. I think it's so hard to, in one way, remember what things were like back then. But also, even if we remember what they were like, how to communicate that to the people around today who didn't experience it? It's really hard to imagine, first of all, in one way, the world before the internet if you never experienced the world before the internet, if you never experienced the world before the internet. Right, that's like one challenge.
Speaker 1:We have it's. It's right on the cusp of being before mobile phones. Yeah, that you actually had a phone that you could call yeah I mean, I think I maybe got my first mobile phone in 94 or something I didn't get mine until 2001 or something yeah, and I wasn't that.
Speaker 1:I wasn't a, I was just a phone that I could call and it was because I moved away from home and they wanted me to have a phone because they knew that I wouldn't have the money to have a phone in my apartment. But I had it and I never used it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Cause it was so expensive. You could but. But I had had one and I couldn't text, it couldn't do nothing, it was just a phone. So we're in a time that's hard to imagine.
Speaker 2:So that's a perfect example, because I think we have today, in our information age, with mobile, smartphones and Internet and stuff, that's an easy example in one way to talk about hey, this is the time even before mobile phones, before smartphones, mobile phones. So now we're trying to talk about something even more hard to encapsulate, which is the state of performance of circus at the time, like, how was circus back then?
Speaker 1:And so yeah, because now we almost have. We have circus, but then we have, oh no, I do circ and that's almost a thing now.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:You go, oh okay, so then it's this type of thing, so they have broken open the mold and reinvented the circus, but it's but a couple of things on that Right, like, like we were talking about the word immersive before, and nowadays everybody says everybody has in their marketing text the word immersive because that's just like a buzzword that they think is going to sell, it's going to speak to certain, certain whoever's, you know whatever is going to connect to them. And it's the same thing with Cirque. That's what happened in North America. Cirque du Soleil became a thing, it became a cultural phenomena. So suddenly, to align yourself with them you would use the word Cirque. And then you got Cirque Productions and you got Cirque Holidays and Cirque this and Cirque that Cirque Mechanics, cirque Holidays and Cirque this and Cirque that Cirque Mechanics.
Speaker 1:And Cirque Noir, Cirque News, Cirque Novelle, whatever.
Speaker 2:No, but like company names. Yeah, that's what I mean as well.
Speaker 1:Like I think Cirque Noir is an actual show. Okay, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think this word Cirque became kind of ubiquitous just through this kind of emulation of like oh yeah, Cirque Dreams was a company back then too, and just through this kind of emulation of like oh yeah, Cirque Dreams was a company back then too, and you know, and it became this like, oh yeah, we want to align ourselves with this kind of branding, because what really happened with Cirque du Soleil and we don't need to get deep into this, we can mention it, but like they just invented their own category, they invented their own genre of entertainment and like in the end of the day, that's what they did, Like they really there's, and that kind of that's kind of hard for them because they made their own category. Like they became they weren't doing traditional circus, they weren't doing opera or ballet or whatever. They became Cirque du Soleil, Kind of it was its own thing.
Speaker 1:Their own conglomeration, just like when you go to a traditional circus, and that feeling of what that is. It's a style of presentation as well. That is, it's a style of presentation as well and, yeah, which is different from what you see in a freak show or a side show, and it's different from what you see in an opera, and they have also using music, so they're using the ears, eyes and mouth and all of those things, so they present it in a different way.
Speaker 2:Cirque du Soleil really, really positioned themselves, that they were doing some sort of cutting edge, you know, really far out, really exploratory, new kind of thing, and again that really built on their early platform of we don't use animals. At the end of the day, if you sit down and examine what you were saying before about the structure and mechanics of Mestere or Saltimbanco or Alegria or Kidam, it's traditional circus but dressed up in contemporary costumes and contemporary music, but the staging is, the rhythm is the same. It's like act transition, act transition. It's not deconstructed like.
Speaker 2:If you get into the, the real contemporary circus of, like france, like french circus at the time, you know our chaos or whatever, um, or whoever else that was real like you're starting to meddle with the fabric of the actual performance itself in terms of deconstructing and whatever the. You know the rhythm of the whole piece or whatever. At the end of the day, cirque du Soleil is pretty true, like Saltimbanco. You have the, the Russian swing act, and then they land and go hip hop like, but they're all looking crazy and they have these worm costumes, they were called the Worms and blah, blah. They have this little storyline of the urbanites and the whatever. But at the end of the day, it's pretty close to the structure of a traditional circus, but Cirque du Soleil made its own category of we can say entertainment or art or whatever you want to say.
Speaker 1:A particular brand of experience.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you. Yeah, exactly a product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but also like a kind of experience and what to expect within that. So they gathered all the different arts and circus and all these things, but they marketed in the new way and that was transferable from show to show so you could immediately look at it and go to picture. One picture and you go, it's a Cirque du Soleil show.
Speaker 2:And I think, in one hand, that was their challenge too, that they invented this category, and then they were kind of siloed into that and they're just like, oh, this is like where do you go from there? Right, and that's, that's their struggle today.
Speaker 1:But the second, difficult, second album.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Make more of the same, or are you going to go into a completely different?
Speaker 2:way. Now they're making.
Speaker 1:And will your audience go into a completely different?
Speaker 2:No, completely different, no, exactly. And then now today they're making Perfume, and then they have the show RUN in Vegas that closed in four months and whatever. And they have the Netflix TV show, luna Petunia, and they have a Roblox video game, cirque du Soleil, blah, blah, like it, just endless Like. Anyway, that's a whole other discussion, but just to say, like, what we're talking about, back when Mystère came, came around, it's really hard to communicate how the world was back then in terms of the performing scene, and it's also hard to communicate how big of a change that mystere brought to the entire industry, or the entire, at least the circus world of and I don't know about production shows, like, potentially, mystere did a bunch of groundbreaking things that had never done, been done in live performance before. I'm not so sure about that, but I do know the combinations of things that Mystere brought to the stage and especially in the genre of circus, was groundbreaking, never done before, and it kind of changed the world. And I'm going to talk a little bit about what those things are cool, um, and so, uh, like, for example, I mean, I mean, overall, the result of that was that it established a format and it and, and it became, because mystere did become successful, uh, commercially. Suddenly there was a point in time when every single casino on the strip was going to have a Cirque du Soleil show. That's not hyperbole, that was literally the plan, like for many years. And they started to build it out right, like at one point Soleil had eight shows on the strip and that became its own game of cannibalism of how do you grow from there, how do you differentiate this show from that show's all the Cirque du Soleil name and we've had all those struggles over the years with that kind of branding. But just to say, mystere established that format of a long-term residency show and a custom-built theater, that that had a theme and kind of had a core identity.
Speaker 2:Um, and also one of the things that happened in Mystere was, uh, uh, in was in terms of that format it established, it kind of threatened the status quo in Vegas at the time, because you were talking earlier about Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack or kind of this humanistic performing. It's on the human level, on individuals and on faces and names and connecting in that way. And Mystère really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way who were established performers in Vegas because it was the first time they kind of made the performers anonymous and it wasn't about the individual, it was about the whole right, and you just became a cog, a little gear in the mechanism of the whole show. You became anonymous, you were replaceable, were teeter-board jumper number seven, you know, and you could be gone tomorrow and you or you could be someone else like the next day or whatever, like it just didn't really quite matter in that way.
Speaker 2:And so a lot of performers at the time you know, in Vegas but also around, like in my circles, they kind of hated Mystere because they were just like oh, that's not real performing and that it also threatened them and it was also hard for them to relate to because they're just like yeah, but these people on stage, they're not, they're not taking, they're not stopping to take applause, they're not. It is the Michael motion, 12 minute long piece of like they're not stopping to go hip and like asking for applause and styling and hitting a pose, and that was so anti you know the antithesis of a lot of what people thought was performing or at least good performing. And so they're just like man, this mystere show sucks. Like they're not, um, they're not actually performing and you don't know who the performers names are and I'm not engaged in this, I'm not drawn into it.
Speaker 2:And the other aspect of this alienating, I'd say, the community, the performing community if it did alienate you, was this uh franco de gon technique of staging other uh characters around the stage during a featured act. Yeah, yeah, which happened in salt and banco, it happened in a nouvelle experience. I mean again, it was always an evolution. It was there from the core of the Soleivari which we have to talk about, we get back to. Then it was baby francoise with the red ball clown act and then baby a big baby yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's a big baby with a big red ball yeah yeah, big and then it was the micro motion piece, but then after that there's a little transition and then there's a Chinese pole. Well, a great example of this idea, of these alienating staging aspects to traditional performing people, was that you have your double level. By the way Chinese poles in the front of the stage on the thrust, and then in the back, at one point during the beginning of the piece, there's literally a line of 20 Chinese poles descending from the ceiling with like 20 Chinese pole performers back there.
Speaker 2:It's just on a scale you can't imagine, and it's hanging in the air, yeah, so it's up so high and it's just coming down from the ceiling, like out of the ceiling, 20 more Chinese poles, and so then you can imagine that these, for example, a performer who's used to being on a microphone and talking to the audience hi, my name is jay and I'm a juggler and blah, blah, blah. Suddenly you're watching, you're in this, first of all, this immersive theater that's built around you, that has this imagery and symbolism of there's a map on the ceiling and stuff it's a whole story but of the myst mystery theater. So you're already sitting in here and you're already maybe being confronted with imagery where you're just challenged to be like what's that map about? Like they don't explain it. Maybe you're already distracted by that. And then, oh, okay, now we're gonna watch a chinese pole act and it's already like a double decker chinese, like two-story tall chinese pole act. So you're already like act is already happening.
Speaker 1:That's a lot to look at. There's four poles. This is crazy, and then 20 more come down from the back.
Speaker 2:And so it really alienated a lot of traditional performers who were just like oh Mystère, this Cirque du Soleil stuff. This is nothing.
Speaker 1:This is some new trend and it's not connecting on a human level, it's breaking apart some of the actual what a lot of people would think was the DNA of what circus is. It's a specific performer coming out to do it and it's the world famous juggler who can juggle nine rings, or the world famous aerialist here she comes out or whatever. I mean it was also happening there a little bit with group acts in Ringling Brothers and stuff with 20 aerialists Spectacle, yeah, spectacle. There a little bit with group acts, and so it was in ringling brothers and stuff with 20 spectacles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, spectacles, so but but these guys.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's a good point. That's a good point. Like in ringling, you have the big spectacle, the three ring circus, and it's just sensory overload and you don't know where to look because there's literally a hundred aerialists around the arena like no, no joke, it's like a hundred people on tissues and then you have like all the people on the floor, three different rings, and you don't know where to look. It's like 100 people on tissues and then you have all the people on the floor, three different rings, and you don't know where to look. It's just all over the place around you. But that's some sort of intended spectacle of just overpowering your senses, whereas in Mystère, like in that Chinese pole piece, I think there is that theatricality implied with Cirque du Soleil.
Speaker 1:And so then, in the theatricality of things, yeah, it's a different in kind, not a different in nature, like it's not, like it's also doing that thing of having lots of performance up, but it's got a different focus and a different intent in it.
Speaker 2:Well, so Franco would say, at least from what I've seen in his interviews. As he said, I want, no matter where the spectator's eye falls, I want there to be a different picture, I want there to be a different story going on. So even and I think that was also just, I think a little bit of it in Mystere, because it was really ramped up in Mystere this kind of extra imagery around all the performing, all the act, main acts, because it was Vegas. I think they were nervous a little bit, like as much as they did take risks and live their dreams and say, whatever, I don't care, I'm just going to do what I want to do. I think there was an element of like, oh no, we're in vegas, are they going to watch the chinese poll act? And what if they look to the side and they're bored? I better put something over there for them to look at. I think there's an element of that. So he was always like, no matter where the eye goes, there's going to be a new story and a new image to see.
Speaker 1:It's just we're still a little bit of a Vegas mentality, yeah, but it is also Gesamtkunstwerk. It's that the building will be so incorporated that there will be frescoes in the roof for you Like, if you think of the church as that, you have Michelangelo painting God giving the spark of Adam.
Speaker 1:So if you're bored by the latin being spoken, which is similar because they also have a language that nobody understands- so when you sit in there and if you don't understand the story, you can look up and you're going oh, my lord, look at, that is and it's not just a trivial painting either like so you have the map and you start to think and is this, oh, oh, am I seeing a relation here? Is that Orion's belt I see in this map?
Speaker 2:Right, right right.
Speaker 1:And is that connected to the jugglers?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I don't know, and those are elements, without being immersive in the way that Queen of the Night or whatever is immersive where you actually walk around in the building. It's immersive in the imaginal realm. Yes, Like all these things that are in here have been put here not for no reason and maybe there's not going to be a story that's like oh, this relates to this or whatever. But you get the feeling when you walk into that theater that there is depth wherever you look well that you just hit it right there.
Speaker 2:If we talk about soleil as a brand, at least in the golden era, it was something along the lines of like. I don't know what it all means, and therefore it means something Like there's this weird thing of like. I paid, you know, back in the day, like 50 bucks, which was crazy Back in the early 90s. I paid 50 bucks for a Cirque du Soleil ticket to go see Saltimbanco.
Speaker 1:I can't remember what it was, but it was a significant amount that we spent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you go see Saltimbanco and you say those were amazing tricks, they did amazing jumps on the Russian swing and you know they have Chinese pole the openings of that show as well, and they have the bungee, the bungee act at the end of the show and all this stuff and you go, that was amazing and like I can relate to that in a concrete way. They were hooked up to bungees, they were jumping up and down. I can relate to that. But also there was like the costume imagery, the music and the vague implied storyline, which all gave you the sense of like I went through a cultural experience that was heightened and elevated. It wasn't just this crass base level of like people doing acrobatic feats, but it was somehow artistic or elevated or meaningful.
Speaker 2:But nobody could really explain to you what the story was of salt and banco. Um, at least you know in terms of when you hear the interviews with the creators and stuff. I mean I saw salt and banco like 10 different times. I can't tell you the storyline other than I can tell you what the what I've I've seen in the interviews with the creators.
Speaker 2:But this idea I think that's part of their brand is that Cirque du Soleil became this kind of symbolic, like cultural experience of I don't know what I just saw, I don't know what that makeup design means, but it must mean something and therefore I've, I have gone through this experience tonight that has elevated my humanity, or you know, my, my, my human experience in this world, and I think they really trade on that like, like soleil as a brand really kind of trades on this, this thing of like we're going to be mysterious and that miss, that mystery, is going to make you feel whatever you need to feel and you're going to pour yourself into it, uh, which I think a lot of different experiences do as well. But soleil really, really hinges on this. That's why they have that like gibberish language right, it's not concrete language and you kind of go there and you feel there was something happening, but like what it was, like I don't know and it's.
Speaker 1:It's interesting too. They're using the language, so then they're also becoming a show with no language, because they're doing it but they can use the invocations of language. Yeah, so you can't go.
Speaker 1:I must also read this and now you kind of know, because of the gestures and the way that they're reacting, you know what it is that's going on. So in one way you go that's interesting. They went so deep, they wanted to create their own language. But you can also look at it just going as a business decision. Just let's make no words, but it's a pity to lose language. Let's use language in a way so the words don't matter somehow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it becomes universal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I thought about just what you were saying there of like a deliberately vague or like the stories that go through these things, which is not straightforward stories, which allows you to look at a whole bunch of imagery and have a feeling like, just under the surface, somehow there is a story here, exactly so that you can live yourself into it, but that being different from the way that myths are, because the myths a myth which is connected to the very start of Mysterio as well, like a myth is an actual, concrete story with real words.
Speaker 1:This guy went over there, then that happened, and then he turned into a donkey, whatever, yeah, and but you are then invited to read into this that, uh, when the God of sleep meets his sister, which is the God of death. Then when they are talking, then we are like getting these oh, death is related somehow to sleep, and then you get these incredible metaphorical understandings from watching it, from a simple story. But they didn't go for that using words. They go for something which is more in the world of dreams or or so so their imagery and their stories are not as concrete, and that was their, which is part of their style which generally works for them.
Speaker 2:I think generally that that that technique washes over people in the best of ways, like you just let it wash over you and you just go. Oh well, I'm getting from this what I get from it. I'm not stressed about it. But some people really do get stressed, like you.
Speaker 2:You go to Yelp and you read the reviews about Mystere or TripAdvisor and there is occasionally a person will be like I didn't understand anything. It was so stupid. I hate this show. I went there. There was a big baby, there was a big snail. I didn't get it. I didn't get any of it instead of.
Speaker 2:So they didn't let it wash over them. They were really looking for the concrete narrative meaning of like, okay, there's a big baby, so now what's going to happen with the baby? And it's like well, nothing really happens. It's just a character that inhabits this world that you kind of get this imagery from right. That's like a Franco-Dragon style tactic or technique, but it drives some people crazy, but for the most part, I think people just don't take it so seriously in the way of they just let it wash over them and then they go. Oh yeah, I feel like something happened and that's enough, but so anyway. So getting back to this again, how the world was back then and how revolutionary the show kind of changed the world. So one thing is in the opening shahravari of the show, like when Mystere starts, there's this shahravari where it's just like all the characters kind of pop out and run across the stage and kind of reveal themselves and they're kind of of, you know, introducing themselves in a visual way, all and also animating the space, that the space kind of becomes alive and you start to understand what your, what space this world inhabits.
Speaker 2:And, um, one thing that happens at the start of the show is the, the main thrust of the stage, the, the main platform of the stage. It just starts to sink down into the ground. Um, it just lowers out of sight, which now, when I say that to you here in this room today, in 2025, sounds pretty anticlimactic, like, oh, the floor lower, did it? Oh, cool, but I can't tell you, man, when that happened it was like the, the bottom fell out of the world. I don't think it was just me either. It was for sure the first time I had seen a big stage production like that, where the whole stage just disappeared. But I think the people around me too were a little bit like whoa like back in 1993, you know, the show opened Christmas 93. It's just like we hadn't seen that stuff before, especially with circus, because nobody had the money to do stuff like that back then. For sure, if you went to see, you know.
Speaker 1:But the sinking stage as well. You can't do that in a show that moves around and exactly it's on this ground, and then it's on the tarmac over here and then it's on the gravel over there.
Speaker 2:It's just in a compute like I can't express to you. Like in my mind, as I sit here talking to you, I can see the mystere stage. I've seen the show 84 times. I can see the stage, I know where I was sitting in the theater and I see the stage disappear and and I can't tell you, I know that feeling inside of me but I can't tell you. It's super interesting. Sorry, man, I'm just very sick, so I can. Right now, talking to you, I can see the stage going down, down and I know the feeling inside of me I had at that moment when I saw it.
Speaker 2:It was, it was like a primal fear, because it's something physically. First of all, that stage is huge. So when it lowers, something, that massive lowering, it's very visceral. It's like standing at the sea. When the sea is in a storm. You feel your humanity of like, oh, something bad could happen here, or it's a threatening thing. So that whole stage started to lower and there was like a bit of a Vertigo or something sitting in the seat watching that stage go down. Here's a woe. Is the building moving? Like, like, what's happening? I thought I was sitting in my chair, I thought that was a solid surface For me, something about that.
Speaker 2:And then and then, and then you have the grid. It's called the grid in the mystere theater and it's this like circular, like half dome upside down. Um, that splits apart so the big taiko drum can come down. And the taiko drum the fun story is that it's the. It's the world's largest taiko drum and it was so big they couldn't get it into the loading dock. The doors were too small, so they had. They knew this ahead of time, so they had to load in the drum with a crane, to the top of the theater before they built the ceiling. It's so big. So imagine that you're there, you're sitting there, first of all the bottom of the world drops out and disappears, and then the, the sky opens, and then the world's biggest taiko drum comes down and you're just like what is happening. So that's like one thing that and the sound of that.
Speaker 1:How was that on the first when they start?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, I mean it's visceral it's, it's deep, it rattles you because it's inside you.
Speaker 1:I mean it's, yeah, it's something interesting in that, in what we aren't going to touch on right now, but the fact of what the show might be about the creation of existence or sure birth of life or whatever. There's something there about it to me knowing it and you picturing it out, because I read Dragone talk about it. I have a quote that we can read when we start to talk about it. But it's not that. It was nothing, it was nothing, it was nothing, there was nothing at all. And then the void you get the feeling of the void as it was nothing, there was nothing at all. And then the void you get the feeling of the void as it opens up. And then in comes this sound that you can feel, shake through you. And Silmarillion in Tolkien talks about the original beings singing the world through the harmonies singing the world, that the noise singing the world into the harmony singing the world, that the noise of the world brings existence to the universe, or even the and so just yeah, right, so just this opening image.
Speaker 2:I guess the point I wanted to make now in explaining it to you. I think those things have become ubiquitous, like you go to other Cirque du Soleil shows now in town and it just happens they have lifts in Mad Apple. Do you come up on a lift? I don't, but a lot of people do in the show.
Speaker 1:Yes, probably I don't come up because the stand-up comedian act comes up out of that.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:That's the yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, comes up there, you go, that's the yeah, yeah, so and and in fact there's a shorthand I have with my group of friends, even today, where it's like we always joke in rehearsal with our little folk circus shows and our little humble, small little creations. We go, yeah, and like, where did? Where does the newton cradle come from? Oh, we got to bring the newton's cradles from over there. Where can they go when we're not using the newton's cradles? And we always joke and say, well, when we do this show with Cirque du Soleil, of course they just go into the floor or they just come from the ceiling. It's the hand of God that comes from a stair. That didn't happen with Nouvelle Experience, right, because it was a touring show. So this is a custom built theater.
Speaker 2:And now this level of automation is crazy. I mean, look at the stage design for the Beatles' Love Show, which closed this last summer, but that stage was incredible. And look at Ka, the stage on Ka. It's its own character. It's this big, huge moving platform. So now we've come to expect this level of automation. So to tell you that the Mystere stage lowered and rotated because it also, besides lowering, it was a big turntable, that that was like a revolutionary thing. It just sounds so pathetic in one way. But I'm telling you, at the time it was unimaginable.
Speaker 1:It was crazy. It's like when in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, then the choir comes in and it sings and we don't even bat an eyelid. Well, who cares? But you do not have choirs in symphonies. That is not the thing. But he did that and now we go like I don't care.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're right, right, right.
Speaker 1:Then the choir comes in and you go. Have you said the thing that is the point here? No, like, we don't Like, oh, and who cares with the form of one thing or the other or so, but no animals. And they're doing all these ticking off the list of stuff that you just go. This is not done. This is what is this? I don't even know how to fully emotionally engage or intellectually engage with this.
Speaker 2:The stage falls down, exactly, exactly. And then?
Speaker 1:later on, you just go. Oh well, look, the stage can go down yeah, yeah, yeah and that's the what we talked about a little bit in the last episode, about how I did, about a cliche right, somebody, who, who, there you go made a strong living from saying follow your dreams, yeah, even if I think that's much more complicated than what I can possibly do in that literally one minute long talk, because you can. Anyway, it's a Hallmark card for your dreams, it's a cliche.
Speaker 1:But at the end of Soiree, when we did this and I built that tower and said that thing on top, it meant something and you could hear the original power of the cliche, because it came alive again, or whatever.
Speaker 2:No, that's good. That's what you just said. There is totally true. So when that stuff happens in Mystere, when I first see it, I don't have the tools to understand what I'm seeing. I can't comprehend it because I don't know how to experience it.
Speaker 1:But what you are experiencing is the mystery. You experiencing the stare, which is a cliche, but you, but I find it such an interesting thing that you know we're talking about the first time when you actually saw it. Yeah, and you've said many times when we've spoken about this, off of the thing, that you, just you didn't, you didn't understand the show. No, and this is the beginnings of that, like you're sitting in, had you seen the show before you saw it live?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I saw it live the first time and because those impressions were so strong, every time I see the show I still remember those impressions, which is a part of the appeal of seeing it again. Because I go, because still, even today, when the stage lowers at the beginning of the show, I'm just like, oh yeah, the stage went down, and remember back in that time and but I have it inside of me. There was other stuff too. So, for example, also in that opening shalavari after the, after the, um, the stage goes down, then there's there's a bunch of things happening.
Speaker 2:There's other taiko drums coming down from the ceiling around the perimeter besides the big one, and there's these characters called the Lakai or the Archangels, and they're these kind of house troop members who have these George Washington wigs on, with long braided hair down like white wig down the back of their costume, and they come and they're, they're. They're normally big acrobats. They're doing like the teeterboard act or whatever. It was korean plank, korean plank back when the show opened. And they come and they stand in the aisles and they stand in the middle of the seats.
Speaker 2:They kind of inhabit the theater space and that was amongst the audience kind of yeah, and exactly in the audience, like they would stand like on your, on the armrest of your chair, uh, for the opening kind of movements and uh, I couldn't believe it, like it, how to describe it? Like I mean, I was like 16 or 17 years old and I was terrified of them. I I knew they were real people. I knew they were actors or performers. I didn't think they were going to get me somehow. I didn't think they were. It's not like when you're a little kid and you're five years old and you go to see somebody dressed up like a gorilla or something and the gorilla kind of growls at you and you go that's a real gorilla. It's not like that. I knew like, like intellectually I knew these are performers wearing makeup and costumes, right, but emotionally I was just like they're right next to me and I don't know what they're going to do. And it was that unknown and and just their physical presence and just the physicality of the space and that they came into the space. It was just a a deeper immersion into the whole thing that was just freaking me out. A deeper immersion into the whole thing, that was just freaking me out.
Speaker 2:And, coincidentally, and what's kind of funny is that there's this documentary where they interview Franco Drogon about making Mystere, and I often like to make fun of this quote because I think it's so silly, but then in looking at this conversation with you, it's actually amazing. So Franco says at one point he goes I told my actors my performer maybe he says actors, I don't know I told my actors, when they walk down the street, I want the people on the street to cross over to the other side of the road, to the other sidewalk, because they're afraid of you. I want the audience to be afraid of you. He said in this interview and I was like that was like so ridiculous. That like, can you imagine you're some director and like we're going to go direct a show? Ridiculous, that like, can you imagine you're some director and like we're going to go direct a show? It's like a circus show in Vegas or something. You know, it's a Cirque du Soleil show. And then I say to the teeter board you know the teeter board, you know flyer and I say hey, you know what? When you're walking down the street tonight after rehearsal, I want people to be afraid of you.
Speaker 2:Like I think that's so insane in one way that it's so completely outside of reality, of meaning, of meaning. It just sounds very pretentious and stupid. But, dude, you know, thinking about it, I was completely terrified of those people when they're in the show just standing next to me in the audience, in the opening of the show. There was something to it, maybe something to the madness is what I'm trying to say. There was like something to his madness about this whole thing that did seep through somehow, like something to his madness about this whole thing that did seep through somehow. And that's what I'm always amazed about in terms of Mystere and also other Vegas Cirque du Soleil shows, is that it is part of a big machine, a big business, multi-million dollars. This micro motion juggling piece on the metal shapes.
Speaker 2:In Mystere, somehow the art seeps through which I don't know, I don't see happening in a lot of other places, like with multimillion dollar productions. Normally, by that point it's so scripted, it's so dialed in, it's gone through so many committees and there's just been like groups of people, which always kind of kills art, right? Oh yeah, you know. And by the time it's distilled down, it's just it's lifeless, right, you know. And by the time it's distilled down, it's just it's lifeless, right, like awakening, I think, in the, the new show awakening in the wind theater where LaRev was. It's just, it's just unwatchable, I think. Um, but something about like Mystere and O and Ka. There's somehow the art seeps through the multimillion dollar machine and still exists, like that micro motion piece and like the hand shadow puppet piece in car.
Speaker 1:There's just these little moments where you go, wow yeah, really interesting, because because it's I haven't voiced it like that, but it's somehow, when something costs 30 million dollars, it has lost, somehow the soul is lost.
Speaker 1:But to be able to keep that, and that was what the magic of those creations which no doubt was absolutely bonkers, and stories of the director throwing shoes at people, right, right, like where it's, like it was demented and went all day, all night and all in and in every way, every excess of creative madness. But somehow that was so strong that when it was translated into a $30 million building in Las Vegas, with all the and Steve Wynn telling him we can't have this, there's not enough applause, you're going to stay on stage and not leave until they stand and have the ovation, whatever it is that the producer is throwing at it, and to somehow, with whatever flaws that the creators of all this have had from their own personal lives or whatever, somehow that artistic image can speak to you, so that I have been moved, fully moved, by watching these productions in Las Vegas you do not kind of think that it would happen or with the company that is Cirque du Soleil.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, yeah, and so for sure there's been other like obviously there have been other shows in the world of any genre, including circus, before Mystere, that had performers go into the audience. Like obviously I'd seen that growing up watching Shriner Circus or Wailing Brothers Circus or whatever show. It wasn't that, but there was just something about that moment in Mystere in the context of that piece in that world that was really unbelievable. I could not believe it, frodo. It didn't make sense to me that the performers weren't on stage but they were rather in the audience next to me. Cause I'm just like, yeah, but they should be on the stage and why aren't they? And that comes back to that confusion, to that artistic confusion. I'm a teenager. I'm still discovering what it means to perform, what are the rules of performing? And they're breaking a rule and I can't understand why or how. And I also, and also because it's affecting me too, so I know there's a value there. So it's not just to dismiss it Go. Oh well, they're not being professional, they're not on the stage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm just like that thing that we just talked about, that you just said, it's the. We can dismiss the stage going down, but when you're in that room and you're sitting there, you go. There is an undeniable power, because you cannot take away my experience of this moment. Yeah, and it affected me in this way. When I came back, it affected me slightly different, but I remember the first one and it changes, as you see it, but there's the undeniability of the emotional experience and the truth of the moment, which is not easy to create, but but whenever we talk about it, it's always going to be less than it was.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:When you see me do my act, I showed you the family show that we had edited and as much as it has been filmed with several cameras and it's a wonderful to put together thing, I feel like, oh, this is I don't. I find it difficult to watch because it's a show that is in its first iteration. It's like basically like a dress, rehearsal or whatever.
Speaker 1:So I'm like, oh, it is so, but also I'm working with my daughter, my working with a child and with my wife, who's neither of them who are performers. I knew so, but in that moment when it was there, the response that we got from those people, the people who put it on, and all the stuff that was it was transcendent, yeah it, that we got from those people, the people who put it on, all the stuff that was it was transcendent. Yeah, it felt like they watched something which was Right.
Speaker 1:But I also have video of the first time they had B-Side show performed at the Glastonbury Festival and that's cringing to watch, right. That had 2,000 people standing ovation, yeah and Haggis McLeod coming up afterwards, cloud coming up afterwards. This is the greatest thing that has happened at the yeah in the circus tent at the glastonbury festival. I just worked there for 25 years yeah, yeah, because it was this unbelievable yeah thing when we did that and it's right on anyway no, no.
Speaker 2:So then a couple other things to touch on from here, which is that I'm just talking about the immerse the immersive merceptivity just made that word up of the show. There was also a character I don't think it was right when the show opened, but a few months afterwards. There's a character called Tony, and Tony was this kind of Charlie Chaplin looking guy with a big, curly black haired wig, with a big black top hat and kind of pinstripe black and white suit, and he used to do this transition into Chinese poles, where I had actually I had sent you a message about this a few days ago, but I remembered it wrong. I went back and looked at it and it's, it's even more crazy. So Tony would go into the audience. He was a, he was a, he was a handstand guy and he would do some crazy handstand tricks on stage just as a character, like again one of these Franco Degas images, just in the corner, and he's there doing the craziest weird handstand push-up things and one arms and whatever. But as the transition into Chinese pulls, he would go into the audience and he would go up and find a fairly like big-looking dude, but who's sitting in their chair, and he would go behind their chair, like in the middle of a row, right, so he's standing in the row behind, so he's basically standing on someone's lap, and he would grab the guy's hands and then pull them up. So the guy was straight armed and the audience guy was straight armed and Tony would press up into a handstand in the middle of the audience, straight arm to straight arm on an audience member. That he just there, with no instructions, it wasn't, it didn't take long, he just there, was a spotlight on him. He would, like, you know, wind his way through the aisle, grab some dude's hands, pull it up, kind of push down to make sure the arms were. You know, he kind of beat to, he didn't talk, but kind of be like, you know, make your arms strong, and he would press up into a handstand from there and then that and then, and then they would have. They would have set the chinese poles on stage to start the act and just like.
Speaker 2:But that stuff happened a lot in the show, like, if I remember, especially at the beginning of the show and and as they had all these crazy, amazing performers that was the other thing too about the show when it opened was they had the top of the top artists of the world um, yeah, this carl bauman, and it was the green lizard and stefan was the red bird and they were going to have philippe petit to do tight wire in the show, which is there's these, so the set design, there's these two green kind of structures on either side of the stage they're called the mountains, and there's these two drawbridges that kind of lower down, and you know it implies like at the beginning of the show these days the drawbridges come down and a couple of dancers come out and dance up there or whatever.
Speaker 2:And there's also Bebe Francois' passage on the drawbridge later on. But like you're like, oh, there's a drawbridge there Like huh, but you know there's a drawbridge there Like huh, but you know there's how many meters of stage in between, the 20 meters separating them. Well, it was going to be that there was a tight wire between the two drawbridges and the thing is those mountains on the either side and the mountains are also where the band is staged on either side.
Speaker 2:They can move, the mountains physically can move and that would tension the tight wire. So you can imagine a tight wire spanning that entire stage without any guy, wires or any other rigging, but it was just because the whole structure of the theater would move and tension it. Of course, philippe Petit never showed up for rehearsal and wasn't in the show, but that's kind of an amazing. But it's also what I mean is the original artists they had for the show. Not only were the ideas ambitious, but they got the most world-class artists in the world to go, which, again, to go to vegas. These days is kind of a thing like, oh yeah, it's not unheard of that. Like a really good artist, like you would go to work in vegas and mad apple, but back in 1993, oh, you're going to go to work in vegas doing a green lizard character, like what. Like that's not cool, that's not okay to do, um, so that was also kind of funny, but going, but. But so they had all these wonderful performers as well as these wonderful ideas and um, going back to that, that idea about the, the format they established, that kind of became a formula, a formulaic thing in a industry standard you could say, especially with like the automation of, like the stage lift going up and down and the ceiling open, the grid opening up, the sky opening up and all these things.
Speaker 2:I remember when I was in absinthe like this, probably 2018 or something and I went to see Gwen Stefani at the Zappos Theater there at Planet Hollywood. She was doing a residency, you know, like they do these days in Vegas and they have these old pop stars do these long runs of shows to cash in on the nostalgia. And I remember going to see Gwen Stefani and there was like 40 dancers on stage, there was floor to ceiling, led panels across the entire back of the stage, there were stage lifts. She was coming in and out of the stage. There was floor to ceiling, led panels across the entire back of the stage, there were stage lifts. She was coming in and out of the stage. Did you hear about um, it wasn't, oh, it was. It was Jennifer Lopez, I think, who did the Zappos theater, where she'd be singing a song and then she'd walk over and a foot sized hole in the stage would just like appear and she would stick her foot down into the hole and they would change her shoe and then she'd bring her so she'd have different like you know, red high heels on and then she'd stick her her other foot in the hole and they'd put, like you know, white high heels on her. So she did like a costume change.
Speaker 2:Like all this stage magic stuff just became again ubiquitous and expected. So I'm watching gwen stefani and I'm just like this is kind of boring. Oh yeah, I was like this was like is this concert good? Like meh, it's okay, like I don't know. And then I kind of woke up and was like what am I thinking? And I remembered Mystere in that moment in 2018. I remembered 1993. I didn't see the show until early 1994, but I remembered Mystere and I was just like it's become so cliche or expected these days that you go to see a pop concert and there's going to be a floor to ceiling video screen, there's going to be 40 people dancing, there's going to be a 10 person live band. That has become so expected that it's it's become blase, it's become invisible or it's just become ineffective. And I remember Raphael Rosendahl from the Good Point podcast.
Speaker 2:He's a visual artist doing digital work and he had a really interesting story where he said, because he would make digital work that would be on the internet. So sometimes in a gallery you would want to show it. So he would need to have a video monitor to show the video, whatever stuff he was doing on the wall in the gallery. And he said at first you would have like a you know 18 inch monitor, like flat screen monitor, and that tech was unavailable to the general public because it was so cutting edge and it's so expensive. But the art gallery would pay 10,000 euros for this little like flat screen thing and you would go to the art gallery and you would see his artwork. But you would also be like wow, that's a really cool monitor. It would kind of impress you a bit into the into, bringing you into the artwork, he said. But then he said you know, the next year that monitor is available at your local electronic store for a thousand euros. So not everybody could have it, but you could. You could maybe buy it for your home. So he would have to get a bigger screen for the art gallery the next year and a bigger screen the next year and a bigger screen the next year to keep impressing the audience with the tech.
Speaker 2:And that's what I remembered about Gwen Stefani's show. It was just like we've come to like peak saturation of this tech, of like having it impress me because I'm just like, well, I don't have a floor to ceiling video screen at home, but like I've seen it every time I go see a show now and I don't have a floor to ceiling video screen at home, but like I've seen it every time I go see a show now, and so it's so blasé and that's a little bit. I mean just in relationship to Mystere. You see that arc then of just technology creeping into shows and into our daily lives and how that affects our experience of of that live experience. So there probably was an element in Mystere of the lighting and the automation when I first saw the show where I'm just like, huh, I've never seen tech do that before and there's a really fun like.
Speaker 2:Another fun story about that is, I guess, a lot of the rigging they did. In Mystere there was some really truly innovative rigging, which I don't know about rigging at all, but they have quite a lot of elements coming in and out of the ceiling in the show. Like I said, around the audience with the taiko drums in the beginning of the show, there's the bungee act, there's a bunch of other stuff happening during the show and so apparently they had gotten a bunch of like uh, uh, crazy like rock climbers out at red rock back in vegas, right. So they had all these these people doing rock climbing who knew kind of new cutting edge rigging techniques with ropes and stuff. So when they opened the show in 93, they had a team of like 27 of these riggers like to run the whole show. But then, like I said, the show's 31 years old, so as the show went on, even 10 years later, a lot of that rigging they had done by hand. There were now machines that would do it. But of course it's like a kind of a union contract where they're like well, we're employing 27 riggers, so we could take this one little electronic box and replace like 12 of those people, but we're not going to because then we're going to cut all those jobs, and so that's another. That technical aspect of Mystere is also pretty interesting to think about, that you're going to run a show for 31 years and the tech that was new in 1993 is now, I mean, think of you're not using any tech that you had in 1993 now, but there was this kind of you know this process and this journey of not just like, well, let's just take the cheapest option or the even even the most secure option or the most updated option, it was just like, well, we don't want to cut these people from them having a job, so we're going to keep doing this kind of archaic rigging from 10 years ago, every single you know, twice a night to save their jobs.
Speaker 2:The show did just go under. They just had a big refresh on the lights a few months ago because all of the lighting instruments they don't make them anymore. They were doing they were using incandescent bulbs. You can't buy them anymore because they don't make them anymore and so it had to be. They had to do led lighting on the whole show. And so Luke Lafortaine, who, uh, did the original light design, he came back 30 years later and redid the lights and put all the new led bulbs in and redid the light design. Um, and there was a nice interview with him about that, saying and and he was saying like, yeah, I came to see the show and I see the mistakes I made when I was a kid doing, you know, because in his mind you know he's he's 30 years younger back then and he's wanted you know one of the one of the first shows of his career. I'm sure you know I mean he had done soleil up to that point. But like you, know he's.
Speaker 1:He's not in the purpose-built theater, where you can say I want the light that comes. He's a young dude. He's a young dude.
Speaker 2:So he said, yeah, I was looking at the light design I made back then and like I wasn't embarrassed but I was like huh, you know, look how naive I was back then. Um, side note, the new light design is horrible and almost. I mean it's just it's brutal because led lights they can't do dim very well and so mystere literally meant, you know, mystery. The show was lit kind of darkly and very mysteriously and nowadays when you go see the show it looks like a I call it like an easter parade. These new led lights. I just think it looks garish. It's just completely different vibe and everything. It looks terrible. But uh, anyway, it's the passage of time. I mean again like yeah, new technologies.
Speaker 1:But I've had that too, where I've been looking at movies and some of those I can't remember which reboot of the Batman franchise, but just having that feeling that I'm seeing, oh, this looks weirdly because it's so HD and the lights are so I don't know what, but it's starting to look cheap again, like television, turkish soap operas or whatever. I'm like. Why can I see? I can see too much here.
Speaker 1:Something has happened where it haven't, because, um, you can argue that certain kinds of art or certain kinds of things do well with being a little bit like theater or whatever, being a little bit dark and and so. But what certainly lives in the shadows is mystery. So when the lights are coming up, it's the book in praise of shadows, a Japanese book on the Japanese aesthetic of a bowl standing on a table, but it's meant to be looked at in half light or whatever. Light coming through paper windows, all this sort of stuff of how that actually changes the nature of what used to be the most beautiful thing. You can't see the beauty now because you've got a bright, incandescent light on it and now we need shiny surfaces, everything needs to be smooth and pretty or whatever.
Speaker 2:Well, in terms of mystere and lighting and mystery, one really terrible. I think in my mind, the worst offense has been that, um. So the back wall used to look like a void, just like a black, a black void, and until I ever had like a backstage tour, I couldn't discern the actual physicality of the theater space. It just looks like it goes on infinitely, um, but now, but in reality, uh. So there's, there's a set element in the show called the sky and it's this huge structural element with color, with tension, with cloth, that they do projections on the sky, low, raises and lowers and everything, um, but in, in essence, the sky actually covers the back wall. The back wall is right there behind the sky, but because it was never lit, it just looks like a black void of infinity.
Speaker 2:And that's also why, again, when I went to see the show the first few times, I couldn't comprehend it. I literally couldn't discern the physical space we were in. I didn't know where it started and stopped. But now, with the new led light design, the light spills so badly because it's so bright. You just see that it's painted. The back wall is painted black. You just see the wall and you go huh, oh, we're in a room now. We're in a room suddenly, instead of we're in a magical world that's infinite or whatever.
Speaker 1:So that's been like one but they warp space, the showman warps space and they warp time. So that's, but anyway, that's really interesting right.
Speaker 2:I mean I wanted to say a couple other things about, because this video screen analogy, I think is, is kind of I don't know why I find it fascinating, but there was other.
Speaker 2:I wanted to give a little bit of a view again, because what I'm trying to establish is like how was the world back then? And like how can we comprehend what mystere meant to the world then? And like what then, therefore, what it means to the world now? So another thing that was happening back then was if we, if we just look at video screens, um, it was a u2, uh, zoo tv, which was one of the, I think, the most, one of the most iconic set design, rock tour set designs ever made. And a couple fun things happened on zoo tv. I mean one was it was made with, uh, mark fisher, who's one of my favorite like, like architects of, like set designs, and he also made the Ka. He made the Ka Theater set design.
Speaker 2:It was Mark Fisher. He had a design firm called Fisher Park. He did a bunch of stuff for Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd back in the day and all these things, but on Zoo TV he invented the B stage, and the B stage again is one of these things that we take for granted today. But the B stage is the little stage in the middle of the crowd, in the middle of the arena, with a little small catwalk from the main stage, which is on the end of the arena, and then at one point the band walks this whole little catwalk, so all those fans who weren't on the front row anymore, they suddenly become the front row, like the front row has been redefined, and so the band walks the catwalk and they do a little acoustic set and this little like four by four meter stage in the middle of the crowd, so it's a 360 degree thing, right, and that beat. This concept of the b stage became nowadays the entire concept of pretty much every rock concert tour. In fact, most stages these days don't even have a main stage, they only have b stages in the middle of the crowds and they, the band, pops up in different locations all over the arena to be immersive and all this and that.
Speaker 2:So that's happening, you know, around the same time as Mystere. And also then that idea that, like Zoo TV, it still used real TVs, basically, like they literally made a set design out of TVs, like with the tubes, the big fat, big heavy TVs. And then later on, uh, you know, you two had the biggest TV screen in the world on PopMart 1997. And that they had pioneered that technology of like floor to ceiling, wing to wing, like led panel. That's that was like, and you know how expensive was that back then, cause they were the first ones who made it happen. They, they had to figure out how to build it, it. And now that technology has just become ubiquitous everywhere, and so I don't know there's something really interesting to to try as well to paint that picture of just how bad it was.
Speaker 1:Not just how bad it was, to paint a picture of just how revolutionary it was, both in what they were doing on stage, but also then in how you got affected as an audience. Maybe we'll wrap up here and we'll do another session. We'll go and drink some warm drinks, because I know you always like to have a nice hot, strong coffee. No, I'm just joking with you here, but anyway, maybe we'll wrap this up and we'll continue on, because this is just like it always is. There's so much more to say and this whole aspect that you come up with in this conversation, it's like of trying to put people into that frame of mind of when, before this existed, 1993, that is a long time ago key things happened in my life. At that time it was like and formative years of of us, and then this show happened. So let's say, continued exploration. Thanks so much for sharing all of this oh yeah, I'm into it thanks for coming along for this.
Speaker 1:Uh sojourn along the way of the showman, it's been a pleasure having you here and I hope you tune in again next week because this is now a weekly podcast for the whole of this month. So, um, please tune in as we continue to delve deeper into mystere. Um, and until then, please subscribe and take care of yourself and those you love, and I really hope to see you somewhere along the way.