It’s tempting, if obvious, to say that Cirque du Soleil has slipped on its new show, “Banana Shpeel.”
But that would be an understatement.
What’s set to open Feb. 25 at the Beacon Theatre is no minor accident.
It is, according to several people working on the $20 million production, a “train wreck,” a “catastrophe,” a “nightmare” and, not to put too fine a point on it, “one of the worst shows you’ve ever seen.”
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Performers and writers have been fired (only, in some cases, to be rehired the next week); rehearsals are chaotic; the director, David Shiner, is described as “clueless”; and Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which owns the Beacon and has shoveled $10 million into this fiasco, is furious.
As I reported last month, “Banana Shpeel” opened to dreadful reviews in Chicago and was set to undergo major retooling before opening in New York.
The show was supposed to be Cirque’s attempt to create a Broadway-style musical with circus acts. Michael Longoria (“Jersey Boys”) and Annaleigh Ashford (“Wicked”), two talented musical-theater performers, were hired as the leads. Theater composer Laurence O’Keefe (“Bat Boy”) was brought in to write the score.
But the plot, which was improvised by the actors because nobody else bothered to come up with a script, was incomprehensible.
And no one with any real authority was in charge of the production.
While “Banana Shpeel” was foundering, Cirque founder Guy Laliberte (net worth: $1.5 billion) was orbiting the Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA 16 spacecraft.
Because of Laliberte’s passion for the Final Frontier, Cirque insiders call him “The Man in the Moon” — which, seeing as he’s French Canadian, we might amend to “L’Homme de la Lune.”
After the critics savaged Cirque in Chicago, the Broadway actors and composer were let go. The plot (such as it was) was tossed out, the New York opening was delayed a month, and the show went back into rehearsal.
Actually, “rehearsal” is not a word used by the Cirque crew. They prefer to call whatever it is they’re doing a “creation.”
“That’s a great choice of words,” says a source, “because they are proceeding without a script or any idea of what they need to do in order to fix the show. They operate by someone in the room having an idea and then they try it, and if it works at all they keep it.”
A couple of scary clowns, played by Daniel Passer and Wayne Wilson, were let go after I wrote that they looked like John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago serial killer who entertained kids as Pogo the Clown.
The two were replaced by a single female clown who doesn’t come across as a psychopath.
Another composer, Simon Carpentier, was also dismissed.
Last week, L’Homme de la Lune beamed himself down to New York to check up on the revised “Banana Shpeel.”
He didn’t applaud at the end. In fact, sources say, he thought the show was worse.
“The show had minimal appeal in Chicago,” one person says. “Now it has no appeal.”
But the two Pogos are back.
After last week’s run-through, Laliberte rehired the scary clowns.
“He thinks they give the show an edge,” says a source.
What are they smoking up there on the moon?