Big Night Out At La Reve
Spinner and I spent last night in the VIP seats at La Reve at the Wynn here in Vegas. It was over the top when Katherine showed us to out seats and served us our chocolate-dipped strawberries. It was overrer the top when she kept topping off our flutes of Perrier Jouet as we watched the cast prepping back stage on our monitor.
Then we just abandoned the top for an hour and twenty minutes of sensory overstimulation. Like a Cirque de Soleil production, this is theater in the round. There was dancing and diving; acrobatics in the air on the ground and in the water. Four incredible Cupids bringing in the comic relief and the emergency first aid for a stricken show dove. Amazing eroticism, homo and otherwise (it is the story of a romance between a man and a woman). Timing and engineering feats that had divers leaving stage areas then immediately diving back into the pools that replaced them and dance platforms rising and sinking in the pool as needed.
And the performers? OMG the abs, they went forever. Impossibly fit bodies as far as the eye could see and costuming that made certain you knew just how hard those bodies were working while still helping to tell the story.
Two parts of the show in particular did it for me. There was an early scene with divers, some synchronized and some solo, performed beautiful and fun dives off an ever rising series of platforms, with the final dive coming from the rafters at least 20 yards above the pool that had been a stage moments before. Later was an amazing scene with two men performing a modern dance/gymnastics routine that ended with one man balancing the other on his back, neck to neck vertically, before diving into the pool. Not sure words can ever do that one justice.
well done…the fear and loathing in LV. i’m always a bit nervous at those things. i don’t want to be at the show where the guy dives into the former stage but, whoops, someone left a stray 2X6 over the water. then there’s me whispering, “you think that paramedic thing is a part of the show”? think siegfried roy and tiger. me after the show, “it’s so realistic the way they staged that tiger attack on roy”.
I’m always reminded of a 4th of July fireworks show I saw in Savannah in 1987, where the show seemed to be building up to a big finale, then abruptly ended with a low burst over the barge being used to launch the show. There were no sirens or anything, but I was close enough to see a fire boat moving in really, really slow. Great show, and probably the only fireworks show I can distinguish in my mind from the countless others. Design or happenstance?