Cirque Dreams promises dazzling Holidaze spectacle

Producer/director Neil Goldberg says his Cirque Dreams Holidaze has changed a lot since it was last onstage at Little Rock's Robinson Center five years ago.

"It's radically different," he says. "There's more of everything, and it has changed in its presentation of combining musical theater, Broadway theatrics, cirque-style entertainment, and we're wrapping it with ribbons and bows to make it a Christmas spectacular."

To begin with, the show, on its 10th anniversary national tour, will feature more than twice as many acts this time, all of them getting approximately half the stage time, when it hits Robinson Center Performance Hall on Wednesday night. And the pace is faster.

"We weren't as social media savvy five years ago," explains Goldberg, who founded Cirque Dreams in 1993. "We take into consideration [people's] attention span. ... A scene five years ago ... maybe would last 7-8 minutes. Now, we don't let anything happen for more than 4 minutes and 30 seconds max, before we're moving on to something else.

"There are 22 scenes in the show. Back in 2012, there were probably 12 or 13. Every scene tells its own story about the holiday season, so we touch on Thanksgiving, New Year's, Hanukkah, Christmas. Snow and winter and wrapping presents and everything your imagination can conjure, we have a scene that we bring to life onstage to help families relive their childhood and reminisce the fun part of the holiday season.

"But we do it with spectacle. Most people sit at home with Scotch tape and scissors and wrap gifts; we fly through the air, and the ribbons are swirling all over the audience with [performers] hanging from them. For young people, it's like a kaleidoscope of color."

In addition to the flying, balancing and gravity-defying cirque feats, there will be theatrical production numbers, illusions and costumed characters -- more than 300 costumes, in fact, on snowmen, penguins, candles, reindeer, toy soldiers, gingerbread men, ornaments and Santa Claus.

"These 30 performers come from 10-11 different countries," Goldberg says. "Some of them have been in our other shows, some are very new to America -- their acts have never been seen before. It's really a very fine-tuned, well-choreographed stage production with live singing and dancing and production numbers, all centered [on] that one special highlight performance that we've scoured the globe to find for each one these scenes."

Goldberg isn't traveling with the show. "I never do," he says. For one thing, he's got four Cirque Dreams Holidaze companies performing more or less simultaneously.

"The demand just keeps growing because of the spectacle and what the show has become," he explains. "I'm in Wabash [Ill.] right now, rehearsing and tech-ing and opening the tour that's going to be coming to you, and then I head to Providence [R.I.] to open the second tour." He's got a company in Nashville, Tenn., that will soon open a two-month sit-down at the Grand Ole Opry and another sit-down company that will spend six weeks in Orlando, Fla.

And Holidaze is only one of the shows operating under the Cirque Dreams brand.

"We have right now seven shows running simultaneously around the world," he says. "As soon as I get back from getting these shows, I'm starting production in January on a new show, Cirque Dreams Storybook; we haven't had a new show, other than Holidaze, for several years. I'll just let the title conjure an image in your mind as to what a spectacle that will be," Goldberg says. It will tour in 2018-19.

There is a performance of Holidaze set for 7:30 p.m. Dec. 14 at the Perot Theatre in Texarkana, but Goldberg says he can't say whether it's the same company going through Little Rock or the other tour. So it's possible, if you like this show, you can either see it again in Texarkana next month -- or you might see something different.

"Each one of the companies vary -- the concept of the show, the 22 scenes are the same, and the template and the framing stay the same," Goldberg says. "But the artists, doing what they do, there's no two of in the world. So we would develop each particular scene and the story of that scene based on different artistry."

The advertising for the show notes that you can see some of the performers on America's Got Talent and other so-called reality shows. Goldberg bristles a little.

"We don't get acts from America's Got Talent; America's Got Talent gets acts from us. They're calling us constantly," he says. "We're very sensitive to what people have seen on television. I want people in our audience to see things that they haven't seen on television.

"We've worked harder and have been more cognizant of trying to create a theater piece that mom and dad can bring the kids and the grandparents, that everybody can sit and enjoy and everyone will get an entirely different experience."

Style on 11/21/2017