First Visit to Vegas: ‘More is Lots More'
Zinc Magazine, photo: Eric Lang
Our first trip to Vegas was probably the weirdest bit, after that I guess we started getting used to it all. We'd managed to persuade the production people at Cirque du Soleil that there was absolutely no way we could think about working on clown numbers for a Vegas erotic show without first doing a bit of market research, so replete with our economy tickets and per diems (Cal being one of the creators of course got to fly Business) we hot-footed it to Sin City while the rest of the cast had to stick it out in freezing Montreal.
We were met at the airport by Lewis Cohen, a lovely bloke who was just starting to make a movie about Zumanity, which became the film ‘Lovesick' a couple of years later [and which I think has just been released on DVD.] He filmed us wandering around the Strip looking dazed for a couple of hours. We had the least relaxing most hectic junket anyone has ever had, bombing round seeing 3 shows a day. We got special tickets to a whole load of shows, Cirque being even then the biggest entertainment company in town, so we got to see a whole load of shows we would never have spent money on: Siegfried and Roy which was still running at that time: insane 80s Planet-of-the-Apes-meets-Blakes-7 styling, Arian tigers on mogodon, playout music written by chum Michael Jackson, plants in the audience who would do their best to upstage the act by mugging fantastically, and truly heroic plastic surgery (it's a shame Roy got mauled by his tiger a couple of weeks after Zumanity opened – when friends came to visit it would have been the number one show to send them to, perfectly summing up the great Vegas aesthetic of ‘more is lots more'; ‘X' (we were there at the beginning of the Iraq war, and the ‘comic relief' between the naff tit bits consisted of a really nasty male comic spitting out abuse of the French and Germans whilst brayed at by pissed people); La Femme (clone-like indentikit-bodied French girls and jolly cool lighting); an afternoon strip club in Fremont Street (sticky floors from the night before, very well-preserved ladies in their 50s doing their thing to ONLY THE SIX OF US. Terrifying); an ancient guy in La Scala wheeling around his oxygen tank between the slot machines; an afternoon show in the seedier end of the Strip, a comedian and lounge singer/impressionist who did inspired work with the dreary audience he had to contend with – we went and introduced ourselves, still unfamiliar with talking about us and Cirque du Soleil in the same breath (got used to that name recognition thing after a while, very handy for getting discounts as Petra will testify).
The last night we were taken by a couple of the big cheeses on the cirque show to one of the new lap-dancing places off the Strip, ‘Jaguars' I think, or perhaps ‘Crazy Horse Too', (it was definitely not ‘Li'l Darlings Totally Naked') where several in our party were relieved (only of money I think). I sat there like a lemon all night desperately not making eye contact with any of the hostesses in case I got charged for something I (really) didn't want and waited until I could get a taxi without causing our hosts offence.
The Liquor Board
Having been hired to do Zumanity because we were funny, edgy and European and not afraid to get our kit off, we then had to deal with some problems with our humourously edgy European nekkidness (an attitude neatly paraphrased by one of my daughter Maja's 7-year-old school friends shrieked on seeing my 2-year-old son Noah: ‘I'm not getting in the pool with NUDEY PANTS THERE'). One of the paradoxes about Sin City is that sexual morality is enforced by the Nevada Liquor Board: you are not allowed to see genitalia if there is alcohol served on the premises. Thus ‘Li'l Darlings Totally Nude' is a dry bar…
Every few months as the Liquor Board were about to do their rounds we would all be sat down for a pep talk by the management, who would describe in great detail what people were and weren't allowed to do to each other: the hand of a male dancer may stroke the naked breast of a female dancer, but the hand may not stop to cup the breast; simulated bumping and grinding with audience members must not involve actual physical contact; bare-breasted women should not touch any member of the audience at all. The list went on and on. Also, the lawyers at the hotel would get really jittery about the audience participation stuff in case they got sued by someone. (In fact someone did sue the show after they had to endure their wife being flirted with by one of the dancers: he claimed that he couldn't make love to her in the same way ever again as he would always be tormented by the sight of his wife in the arms of a gorgeous Cirque du Soleil artiste. Mmmm… I think they managed to get out of that one OK. Like those people who sue Macdonald's for serving them hot coffee, there are litigant tourists who go round trying to work out new ways to sue Cirque du Soleil.)
So when we were innocently coming up with charming Old-World burlesque routines in the studio in Montreal we didn't consider the fact that we weren't going to actually be able to be completely naked. We made a choreographed routine that featured four cheer-leaders with pom-poms with a complicated choreography that Aitor would inevitably get wrong, and then lose his pom-poms into the crowd, and would be forced to manoeuvre his very hairy and sweaty body over (and very close to the faces of) the now hysterical audience. In fact Aitor should have been the one doing the suing: he used to get smacked on the arse by over-stimulated matrons. Sometimes his cheeks would have great welts on them, you could see the hand-prints. On a good night the audience would keep passing his pom-pom between them, and keep him running for the whole of the rest of the number, accompanied by huge roars every time he got deeper into the shit.
Anyway, we had to have these rather sordid merkins made by Cirque at vast expense, with pubic hair (Lucy our designer had to take a sample from all of us and send it to Montreal). The first versions had hollow plastic molded penises which protruded at an unlikely angle – had no-one in the wig department checked recently? They then cast (at even greater expense) very life-like latex ones that had a proper weight to them, and swung about very authentically. But the ribbons of the pom-poms would wrap around them and being that slightly sticky latex, if you moved them quickly it would pull off the merkin, so we had to go back to the crap ones.
