Review: In Las Vegas, Cirque du Soleil’s ‘O’ is both an analog throwback and one of the greatest shows ever

LAS VEGAS — When it comes to live entertainment, two trends now rule this famed city in the desert. One is the rise of midcareer musical headliners like Adele and Katy Perry, commanding eye-popping ticket prices. The second is projections. With the late September opening of the Sphere, a $2.3 billion — not a typo — venue at the Venetian Hotel, Vegas gained an 18,000-seat auditorium wherein the entire structure (inside and out) is an LED screen. At 160,000 square feet and with a 16K resolution capable of apparent duplication of actual daylight, the Sphere has the largest such screen in the world. From the airport, it now glows like a displaced orb.

But on Oct. 15, a seemingly ragtag band of actors, dancers, divers and circus people paraded through the Bellagio Hotel and Casino, looking like time-traveling visitors from either the 1690s or the 1990s, the latter being when Cirque du Soleil’s “O” first opened. Dealers looked up from their cards, tourists whipped out their phones and cocktail servers shouted “Happy anniversary!”

There was good reason. “O,” which plays to 3,600 people a day, is the single highest-grossing piece of live entertainment in history. The show, which uses a 1.5 million-gallon pool, obviously cannot tour, so franchises like Disney’s “The Lion King” have eclipsed its box office takings on a multi-company scale. But if you want to know which single show is the most successful in the world, “O” is the obvious candidate. By my calculation, it must have played to more than 20 million people, most of whom had never seen its like before, and have not seen its like since.

For those of us who were there on opening night, the 25th anniversary of “O” (pronounced like “eau,” the French word for water) was a reminder both of how fast the years have gone and of the incomparable genius of Franco Dragone, its writer and director. Dragone died in Egypt last year from a heart attack, but Gilles Ste-Croix, the artistic overseer (or “director of creation”) was in Vegas, as was Guy Laliberté. The two men, both former street performers, were the founders of the Cirque du Soleil, although they have sold the company.

For all the hype about its technology at the outset, “O” is an analog show made with materials like platforms, pulleys, boats, cable systems and curtains. The pool is real (the divers who assist the performers are said to play craps underwater when they are not needed). The music is live. The cast still numbers 85 (the show is said to be the largest employer of former Olympic divers). The stagehouse is as vast as the auditorium. There is not a single video projection in the entire shebang.

Dragone was a true artist: his show drew from Italy’s commedia dell’arte, as well as from Indian and African forms. There is no plot as such; “O” is like a painting, only it moves before your eyes. It is a show themed around the importance of water to life — a truth very much in the news now — but Dragone was an unparalleled aesthete and surréaliste. Like a Magritte or a Rothko, the show’s pool constantly shape-shifts, fooling you with its depth or sudden lack thereof. The characters, many funny, some sad, enter and exit as if you were somehow able to enter someone else’s grand dream. There are amazing feats like the highest diving you ever saw in a show, but also versions of the rituals of everyday life, the times when we drink for sustenance or to stay alive.

Some years after “O,” Dragone was lured away by the Wynn Hotel across the street to create a show called “La Reve,” a second aquatic show. This time he referenced the deadly 2004 tsunami; the show featured seemingly pregnant women washing up on the shore, which was not what Steve Wynn had in mind when it came to entertaining his gamblers. I remember being in Las Vegas as the controversy unfolded with Wynn shouting down my phone about Dragone, and the brilliant but controversial show was retooled. And never quite the same.

But “O” took big risks, too. Neither Elvis or the Rat Pack introduced a funeral procession into their entertainments. Dragone had those kinds of guts: he knew the popular audience could embrace beauty if combined with spectacle, and he was right.

“Oh,” you think, as you watch “O” now, “they constructed an actual small village inside a casino.” I had much the same reaction when I saw the final performance some weeks ago of “The Phantom of the Opera,” another great theatrical presentation with colossal physicality and no screens anywhere. Back then, some scoffed at all the spectacle. In 2023, when you can project anything onto anything, these shows feel like precious relics from a purer time.

Nobody would ever produce “O” from scratch now. It would be prohibitively expensive, even in Las Vegas. Most of us spend our lives staring at small screens and when we recreate, most of us then choose to spend that time in the company of a screen of yet bigger dimension and with yet more pixels.

If you look closely at what is happening on Broadway and elsewhere, you can see the slow but sure integration of audience members’ phones into the shows. Sure, some ask you to turn them off, but others now suggest you just dim the brightness or wait until the final number. Artists have to be marketed and audience videos shot on phones are now the most effective tool. The consequences of this are, to my mind, both everywhere and mostly unseen.

But you turn your screen off at “O,” and get a jolting reminder of just how much is different now from the turn of the 20th century. I watched ordinary people coming out of “O” exhilarated and restored, onto the Bellagio’s casino floor, where slot machines are really now just video screens, easily reprogrammed as trends and tastes change.

“O” is the greatest theatrical anachronism in the world, still playing twice a night. We won’t see its like again.

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Open run at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, 3600 S. Las Vegas Blvd., Las Vegas; tickets from $79 at www.cirquedusoleil.com.

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