I suppose I should feel sorry for the poor, lithe beautiful kids who perform the aerial ballet at Cirque Du Soleil’s “Love.” Billed as a tribute to the music of the Beatles at the Mirage in Las Vegas, someone is using these performers as flesh props in a kind of black mass. It felt so profoundly evil, I stormed out, asking the pretty usher at the door, “why are you folks mocking the Cross?”
“Is that what we’re doing?” she responded.
She was wide eyed. I’m sure she didn’t know, and that any further conversation would have led to a call for security. She is working, after all, for the largest live theater company in the world, big enough to license the music of the Beatles, big enough to borrow, for their sheer weight, melodies resting in the hearts of an entire global generation. Behind her, the stage itself, powered by hydraulics that would do a battle ship justice, was rising up at the bowels of the earth and peopled with some of the greatest dancers in the world. These ballerinas were taking to the air, arcing down into center stage from three stories up – a quartet of Tinker Bells all grown up, except that it wasn’t animation. These were dancers in the sky.
Who could possibly object to all of that?
Who indeed? I’m no Southern Baptist. When the pretty girls above me first winged down onto the stage, I giggled like an eight year old boy. If this were a Dean Martin tribute and the stage was full of leggy dancers with feathered pink crowns, three feet tall, I would have been dazzled, and unashamed. God is the author of music and dance and celebration – and the glories of the female form. I actually like Vegas, and there’s a comradery at the black jack tables I don’t always feel in church. I’m not making a Hayes code objection here.
No, this is serious; the messaging in “Love” is actually demonic. You fight it at first, not wanting to believe what you are seeing, but stage dance these days celebrates the androgynous. A few of these creatures prance in, sporting the now mandated rainbow colored wardrobe. “Okay,” I thought to myself, “the politically necessary nod to the gay mafia; it will pass.”
But the strange sodomite vibe is only relieved from time to time, to avoid putting off the audience of largely normal people. The show actually begins with one of the Beatles’ darker tunes – Eleanor Rigby, and, of course, with a little reflection the reason is obvious: it gives the producers a chance to actually turn “Father McKenzie” and his sad, unheard sermon into something far darker. Elevated in the center of the “lonely people,” a creature of profound ugliness is presented haranguing the healthy young bevy of beautiful people below him. The message is clear – Christianity is “evil,” and the gods of the dance are “good.” Woe to those who can’t be bothered to read the symbols. The folks at Cirque du Soleil are taking a dump on the faith.
I can’t really say this qualifies as a “review” of the production, because what followed for me cut it all short. The multi-million dollar stage transformed itself into a skate board park with two half-pipes, and the aerials, as you might imagine, were stunning. These kids were flying, but then I looked down at the stage floor to see sheeted creatures, wickedly mitered, and Klan-like dancing outward toward the perimeter and revealing the centerpiece of the skateboard park: a cross. The performers were gleefully flying over the cross of Calvary. The central event of history, the great banner under which armies have marched and souls saved, was reduced to trailer park graffiti, and the rainbow-clad demons were laughing with glee.
That’s when I walked out and encountered the pretty usher, who didn’t have a clue what her show was all about. The irony here is that she’s the intended audience, like many in her generation who never heard enough of the gospel to even consider it, much less come to its defense. Today’s pagan cultural elite are in desperate need of an enemy, a “Father McKenzie” who doesn’t actually exist, so the shame they feel at their own lifeless sexuality can be smothered in secular self-righteousness.
Now they could take on the caliphate, of course, and the Q’uran. They could mock Mohammed and his violent followers–the people who actually do stone homosexuals and adulterers. That really might make for a great show. Cirque du Soleil and the Barbary Pirates?
Nah. They’re not man enough for that.
