Las Vegas Weekly

December 29, 2008 · 11:22 AM

Cirque du Soleil stars set to join Robbie Knievel on Fox’s NYE telecast

By Robin Leach

The cast of Love, celebrating its third anniversary at the Fest for Beatles Fans last year, hits the Mirage.

Photo: Scott Doctor/www.greatscottstudios.com

Three shows in the Cirque du Soleil lineup of Strip spectaculars get fabulous free exposure on Fox’s live, 90-minute New Year’s Eve spectacular. When cameras cut back and forth from the Times Square ball drop sometime inching toward 8:50 p.m. our local Pacific Time (11:50 p.m. in New York), stunt king Robbie “Kaptain” Knievel will create world history with a 200-foot jump through the exploding Mirage volcano.

Mindfreak magician Criss Angel will be featured from his Believe show at the Luxor; the sexy side of Cirque will go on display with a flash of flesh at Zumanity in New York-New York; and the cast of The Beatles Love musical at The Mirage will dance to that Liverpool sound!

Musicians Daughtry, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Scott Weiland and American Idol’s Season 7 winner David Cook will be the musical backing for Knievel’s stunt jump. The show, which seems to be growing in star power by the moment to compete with ESPN’s rival stunt jumps also on the Strip, will be hosted by Spike Feresten, star of Fox’s Talk Show and Mark Thompson of Hole in the Wall. Click HERE and HERE for our exclusive interviews with stunt riders Robbie Madison and Rhys Millen, who have death-defying stunts in the head-to-head ESPN spectacular.

When Robbie Knievel does his jump across The Mirage volcano on Wednesday night, it will be 41 years to the day that his dad Evel Knievel crashed over the Caesars Palace fountains. To avenge his father's disastrous near-dice with death, Robbie duplicated the jump on April 14, 1989 -- and succeeded without any problems. Click HERE for the YouTube video replay of that historic moment.

It’s been surpassed only once when Mike Metzger jumped the same fountains complete with a first-time-ever 360-degree backflip. As far as Strip stunts and daredevils go, for Robbie it’ll be more complicated and more dangerous in just 72 hours time now because he will have to leap 200 feet through and over the 900-degree scorching fireball eruptions that explode more than 60 feet high in the air on the Strip.

Our Vegas DeLuxe cameramen and videographers will be on both sides of the Strip for the rival simultaneous jumps -- and we’ll have those staggering sights and sounds right here on New Year’s Day.

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