Beatles' legacy revived with Love show in Vegas

It was Beatlemania all over again. Flashes popped and hundreds of fans screamed as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr walked the red carpet for the opening performance of Love, a surrealistic portrayal of the Fab Four’s career performed by Cirque du Soleil.

The event early today Irish time, at the retooled Siegfried & Roy Theatre at The Mirage hotel, chronicles a deconstructed musical trip through the Beatles’ past.

John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono, wearing a large white hat and matching pantsuit, drew loud cheers from fans.

“All this time when I was working on this show in the rehearsals, I thought: ‘Oh, John should be here’. That’s the only thing that I regret, the fact that he’s not here because he would have enjoyed it so much,” Ono said.

Olivia Harrison, the widow of George Harrison, spoke over her shoulder as she was whisked past a crowd. “I hope he (George) would like it.”

Love is a dance and acrobatic spectacle filled with characters from their songs – the walrus, Lady Madonna, Sgt Pepper – and set to a soundscape made of parts of songs, outtakes and fragments of sound that are sure to please fans and at the same time leave them full of questions.

“John? Who knows about John,” said George Martin, the Beatles’ long-time producer about John Lennon, who was shot dead on December 8 1980.

“If he saw the show, he’d probably say: ‘Yeah, but it could be better’,” said Martin, who worked with his son Giles Martin, to create the 90-minute show’s soundscape.

In Love, the Beatles’ dream world does appear on stage.

The performance explodes early at the hotel-casino’s €104m, 2,013-seat theatre with Get Back, the band’s 1969 hit, as dancers and acrobats jump and twirl in the air.

Set to blended, reversed and enhanced parts of 130 songs and unpublished out-takes, the acrobatic and dance spectacle takes the audience through the Second World War, the 1960s era of “Beatlemania”, the band’s reclusive studio years and a psychedelic time that produced songs such as Strawberry Fields Forever and Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

Some moments allude to real-life events, according to creator Dominic Champagne. Hooded figures throwing knives at a cross hint at threats made by the Ku Klux Klan against the Beatles after Lennon famously proclaimed in 1966 that the band was “more popular than Jesus”.

Also dramatised to A Day In The Life is Julia, Lennon’s mother, whose death in a traffic accident early in his life is thought to have created a bond between Lennon and McCartney, whose own mother died when he was young.

“I tried to get inspired by the lyrics, but also the moments and the motion of their careers,”

Champagne said. “We tried to be spiritual and physical without trying to be too didactic. I didn’t want to do the live version of The Anthology. We’re not here to teach the Beatles story to people.”

What emerged is a multitude of symbols and metaphors that will have dedicated fans dusting off their LPs and looking through lyric books.

A South African tap dance in yellow gumboots to Lady Madonna evokes the “children at your feet” line from the song. A lonely looking Eleanor Rigby drags her belongings like a bag lady behind her on stage, while Doctor Robert, who allegedly gave the band LSD in their tea, merrily carries a teapot in hand.

It was Harrison’s desire to do more with the Beatles’ legacy and his personal friendship with Cirque founder Guy Laliberte that sparked development of the project. The Beatles’ company, Apple Corps, then signed off on Love.

The production is the first major theatrical partnership for Apple Corps, which has earned a feisty reputation for having sued companies from Apple Computer Inc to record label EMI to protect the band’s legacy. It also marks the company’s most significant endeavour since 2000 when it released “1”, a CD collection of 27 No 1 singles that has sold more than 24 million copies.

Giles Martin likened the long hiatus to the quiet time from 1966 to 1967 that his father spent in the studio with the Beatles to create their seminal album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

“Sgt Pepper was done because the Beatles stopped touring,” he said. “And this was done because the Beatles aren’t here.”