Zaia: Cirque Du Soleil's New Macau Show! マカオの新シルク・ドゥ・ソレイユショウ

An Etchy blog / alivenotdead.com exclusive!  マカオのベネチアンで新シルク・ドゥ・ソレイユショウの説明プレスコンを参加した。ビデオと写真を見て下さい。

Last Thursday I had the good fortune to be invited to attend a special press event in Macau at the Venetian Casino.  They are going to be doing a Cirque Du Soleil ( wikipedia) show there, similar to the permanent shows they have in many Las Vegas casinos (Ka, O, Zumanity, etc).

Before giving us a teaser, they had a short press conference with the heads of the Venetian, Cirque Du Soleil as well as the writer for the show and the original founder of Cirque, Giles St. Croix.

The show is tiled 'Zaia' -- the name of the main character, which according to the writer, is a young girl who is dreaming about traveling through space.  Its scheduled to open publicly at the end of August to celebrate the Venetian's 1st anniversary.  As with all Cirque shows, they have a rather impressive 1800 seat theater made especially for the show - complete with some rather impressive technical capabilities (lighting, moving stage pieces, overhead tracks for acrobatics, etc).

They presented two excerpts from the show,  I took some poor quality video to give you an idea of what it looks like.

The first part was an ensemble number:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58quq14njjo As you can see... a real 'kitchen sink' type thing... tango dancers, step dancers, break dancer guy, acrobats, rollerbladers, skateboarders, guy in a balloon hanging from the ceiling,  clowns running around, you name it...    

....and yes that is a guy riding a bicycle upside down.  How the hell do they load that guy into that rig?

Personally I'm not the biggest fan of these types of stage performances... but for me the impressive part here was the technical side - they had the cityscape set pieces rotating as they raised and lowered and of course the moving overhead globe (25' diameter!) with internal projection.... 

According to their press release, the theater, stage and development of the show cost US$150 million...  which I suppose I can believe after seeing the performance in the theater.

.  Just the lighting controls looked expensive. :-P 

The 'star field' was quite impressive... basically its a planetarium worth of stars laid out on the backdrop of the stage.

The second performance was much more interesting to me from a performance point of view.  It was two people doing some impressive acrobatics:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SejBN4aow Pretty cool, huh?   Death defying yet graceful.   I know a few people who work on the Ka show in Vegas, so I know how much time these guys spend preparing for these shows. 

That's supposed to be Zaia btw. 

Like i said, this was the more impressive of the two portions for me... particularly the fact that they did some rather breathtaking acrobatic moves ...  at one point she removes her ropes and is just being held up by the guy, which seems rather scary, considering the heights they were flying around at. 

At the end they did a curtain call:

I am curious to see how this show does here in Asia.  I think it will appeal to western and japanese tourists visiting Macau,  and Chinese and expat one-day visitors from Hong Kong,  but I'm not sure how the Mainland tourists will take it... and if you want to fill an 1800 seat theater 6 days a week, you need to get them!

Based on my experience and knowledge, there are two types of Mainland Chinese that come to Macau -

1) the average sightseer tourist who comes in a tour package and does all the typical tourist spots + a casino or two.

2) the super-hardcore gambler who comes with a lot of money I'm not sure how well either group will take to a spectacle like this,  the #1's may not be able to afford the high ticket prices, and the #2's may not want to be distracted from their baccarat! :-P

                                            It'll be interesting to see how it goes. Perhaps this is a first step in fostering a market for big casino shows in Macau similar to what they have in Vegas.  

Regardless, I'm hoping to check out the show when it opens, I'll come back with a review when that happens, stay tuned!