The original plan was to do some kind of trip out into the desert today, either a Grand Canyon tour or one of the others, but I decided not to to because of the heat warning – pretty sure my travel insurance would laugh at me if something happened, and it’s hot enough that my breathing is affected after a while. It’s not like I can’t come back here, and there’s no sense in doing something dumb.
Instead, I went to a Cirque Du Soleil show.
Breakfast today was at one of the many restaurants right on the casino floor; Thankfully, the wall of noise from the machines & piped music doesn’t get into the restaurant itself.
I wanted to go wandering around the restaurant taking pictures of the enormous murals depicting postcards from different parts of the US, or the enormous thing on the ceiling depicting the US in stereotypical tourist map form, but there were a bunch of people in the restaurant and I couldn’t really see a way of doing it without taking their photos. But it was a fun space; They’d gone so over the top that it was just fun.
I got a pretty good seat thanks to a discount system they have in place to fill single seats scattered through the theater, so I was seven rows back from the front, and right in the centre.
No photography during the performance, for any number of reasons, but I did take a couple of pictures of the theater setup beforehand.
There was what looked like a “performers messing with person who was still on their phone” bit, which then turned into the phone, and then the person, being thrown over the edge of the open pit where the stage was. I’m going to assume that was a set piece, but maybe they just take that sort of thing really seriously.
The stage space had a lot of moving bits, the core of which was a huge platform which could rotate & move pretty much freely, so at various times it was a boat spinning flatly to show off all the things happening around the edges, or it flipped somewhat vertical to become an ice cliff, or entirely vertical to become the top down view of a final battle sequence where the performers had harnesses so that they could jump and spin around.
My favorite bits, I think, were the more clown-y parts, and the Inuit flying machine. I will be taking no further questions at this time.
According to the program, this is an unusual Cirque show because it has a storyline. Having looked up a description, I got most of it, though missed some smaller bits; There was a lot going on.
