Bigger Than Vegas

The big battle is about to begin--good guys on one side, bad guys on the other. They advance and clash, executing kung-furious feats of acrobatic derring-do. It's like a Hong Kong action film, but every take has to be perfect. It's being done live, in a theater at Las Vegas' MGM Grand, so any misstep could injure a performer and kill the flow of the drama. Moreover, the battlefield is a large platform that has been tilted 80°, a nearly vertical position. That gives the audience a unique, God's-eye view of the action, but it's hell for the performers, who must fight to keep their balance--or off they plunge into the void.

Kà, the Cirque du Soleil show that opened last week, is the latest, largest demonstration that the Quebec company--which began as a circus with no animals--has become the gold standard for live entertainment. Like a circus, Kà showcases jaw-dropping acrobatic feats, but it cradles them in outsize theatrical wizardry: a huge stage space with many scene changes and a theater designed to suit the show, with side balconies from which the performers can fly over the audience. Like a Broadway show, Kà has a plot, a dozen or more characters and a sonorous score. It blends these two forms and extends them with the company's determination to create something new under the Las Vegas sun--a spectacle of burly martial arts contained in a tender love story.

The battlefield climax to Kà is merely one of the show's hundred or so impossible epiphanies. A royal barge revolves on a placid sea; a boat rocks wildly and sinks; a woman plunges 70 ft. and is dragged back up; a beach suddenly comes to life with an acrobatic starfish and contortionist crabs; a forest of metal tubes features a giant stick bug, a scorpion and an 80-ft. snake; a tepee turns into a man-powered flying machine; actors scale a sheer cliff, an icy mountain--all onstage.

Except there is no stage--anyway, not a stable floor. Instead, a void, out of which some ethereal miracles materialize. Many of them take place on two huge surfaces: a 1,250-sq.-ft., 175-ton slab (known as the sand-cliff deck) and a smaller one (the 900-sq.-ft., 40-ton tatami deck) that can simultaneously lift, rotate and tilt. Thus the actors must perform many of their maneuvers while the earth is literally moving under their feet. (If they fall off, there's a 60-ft. drop out of sight and onto an airbag.) Other scenes occur in midair, with the actors on wires or clinging to poles. That lends an antigravitational buoyancy to an artistic enterprise that revels in breaking all the rules about what technology can achieve and the human body can endure.