Bigger Than Vegas

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Also space-age technology and Stone Age storytelling. In Japanese, kà can mean "fire," and Lepage sees fire as "the birth of performance." In prehistoric times, people would sit in a cave around a fire and, says Lepage, "one day, a guy stands up, and the shadow behind him on the wall is the first form of using technology to tell a story." That notion inspires one of Kà's loveliest moments: the male twin and his court jester make shadow puppets--a rabbit, a dog, a bird--on the wall. Simple magic. So is a dance, by Noriko Takahashi, as the daughter of the Counselor's chief archer, that expresses the purest love through the choreographer's art and the dancer's plangent grace. Behind the scenes, Kà is dizzyingly complicated, with a crew of 165, including technicians who operate the gurney crane that moves the platforms and stagehands who prowl the 60-ft.-deep backstage area. But the technology doesn't overwhelm the action or the performers; it enables them.

That is the Cirque secret: rendering the undoable beautiful. Aiming for the highest common denominator, Cirque makes nearly every other form of entertainment seem timid, sullen, earthbound. Kà flies at its own giddy altitude and takes you along for the ride. If you catch the import of every gesture and plot point, fine. If not, you can still feel the lift and thrust, the vertiginous thrill. Either way, it's quite a trip, one that turns an evening at the theater into an exalting hallucination. Kà induces rapture. --With reporting by Steven Frank/ Las Vegas