Meatfest... Cirque du Soleil: KA

Ahh, another year of adventuring in Las Vegas.  This week, I'm going to offer you a glimpse into the wonderful worlds of the Cirque du Soleil and what I like to call Meatfest at a local eatery called 'Fogo du Chao'.

It had been a long week, my first full week of work since I moved here actually.  So as a congratulatory meal to myself, Tanya and I and Frank decided to visit a Brazilian steak house.  These places are special.  What happens in a Brazilian steakhouse is, you have a marker on your table which is green on one side, red on the other.  There are many waiters roaming the restaurant with long skewers of 10 different kinds of the most succulent, fire grilled meat you will ever have!  And so, if your marker is 'green side up', they come to your table and offer you a slice off of their skewer.  It could be beef, pork, chicken, lamb, ribs, ... All meat.  If your marker is red side up that means you've had enough, for now.  Maan, what a meal!  That meat is friggin' fantastic!  We settled in for a good hour and a half of piggotry.  That's not even a word but I'll use it and you know what I'm talkin' about.  The salad bar is great too, with all the fixin's to go along with all that meat.  It had some of the best smoked salmon I've had yet here in Vegas.  But the meat.... oh man!  It was pricey at $45/person, but that's what you normally pay here for a meal so its not extraordinary.

On saturday night Tan was able to get some 'locals' deal on the Cirque du Soleil show KA.  So it was a lot cheaper than normal for us and we wanted to see it again.  The first time around, well folks,... it blew my freakin' mind.  Words cannot describe what I witnessed that night.  This second time around, I'll give it a whirl just to try and share that experience.  They won't let you take pictures in there, so I didn't find any worthy of sharing.  You'll just have to take my word for it, or come and see it for yourself.

First off, its nice to get a good jag going before you go in.  The Cirque shows are mind benders, so its good to be nice and lubed up for it.  Beer was relatively priced at $7, water was $6 and a bag of chips was $4.  Luckily I knew this and had a good rum-soak going for me before I went in.

The KA theatre was built especially for this show and upon entering, its as though you've entered into the hull of an old wooden ship.  If you wait long enough in the lobby, high above you, an old man will come out and play this huge wooden piano-like instrument with its strings strung on the outside over its wooden shell, far over your head and across the room.  The music is pumped in through the sound system, a bass cello or something, but to your eyes, that old guy is playing some fantastical instrument with a deep foreboding sound.  Like an ancient seaman warning you to stay away.  You get into the theatre and its like you've entered an otherworldly village.  There are many towers hanging from the ceiling on both sides of the stage, and from those towers the native characters are chirping and getting all worked up.  They are dressed up in full-body, skin colored tattoo suits and meager leather armor.  They rule the roost before showtime, and are jumping from towers which are probably 75' high, swooping in low on bungee cords and bouncing to land on another tower.  They also roam the audience, climbing over the seats to get in your face to wonder who you are and what the hell you are doing in their theatre.  They don't like us.  They're harmless creatures, but strange and a bit unnerving nonetheless.

This Cirque show follows a story, unlike any of the other Cirque shows.  Two royal twins get separated  and the story follows their struggle to find one another again.  But the thing that makes this Cirque show so worthwhile is the theatre and the stage.  That stage is a whole thing all its own!

Picture this.  Its a theatre of course, but the stage is hovering there before you over an open void.  There is no 'stage-proper'.  When the show starts, that hovering stage rotates and tilts towards you so it changes your viewing perspective.  And for the rest of the night, the whole stage area... up and down, becomes an enormous performance area that seems to defy space and physics.  The main movable stage is 50' wide and 25'deep, and the main set for many of the acts.  In the beach scene, it is covered in sand (granulated cork actually, which looks exactly like sand), and as the scene goes along, the bad guys attack and the stage begins to rise and turn 360degrees, more and more steeply as the main characters try to get away.  All the sand drains off and you can hear the arrows hitting the ground which produces rippled graphics (projected digital) that go out from each strike.  Those ripples (arrows) that have hit now become pegs that have popped out of the stage itself to become pivot points for the characters to use to climb and swing from as the stage rises ever so higher.  The chase ensues as the stage rises steeper and steeper until its almost a straight up and down, a 50' drop!  A hundred feet into the chasm below.  It is absolutely mind blowing seeing that chase scene.  Its like the scene has all of a sudden become a two-dimensional thing, like its on TV and we're watching it from a sky-cam.  The sheer scale of that stage and the mechanics involved is incredible.  Its so well done.

The next scene, with the stage still elevated to 90degrees, is that of an ice cliff.  The ice cliff is projected onto the stage surface, very convincing, as the characters climb up the pegs, 50' up to the top, complete with the cracking sounds and falling ice graphics as they climb the wall.  There are so many tricks of the mind and eye in there, that's why I had to see it again.  And of course there are all the aerobatics and circus stuff built into every Cirque show that defy normal human abilities, so its always great entertainment.

Truthfully I don't think it was as good the second time around.  The story got in the way this time, but all the mind-bending stuff was still there so its still just as potent a visual treat.  If you see one Cirque show, though it may be pricey, I would highly recommend KA.

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

PS ... for those geeks out there who love the science of things, here's a cool site on the mechanics of the KA stage.

Tisfoon Ulterior Systems