Las Vegas Weekly

December 23, 2009 · 2:06 PM

Viva Elvis Part 3: Director and writer Vincent Paterson

By Robin Leach

Cirque du Soleil gives a sneak preview of Viva Elvis at CityCenter's Aria Resort & Casino on Dec. 15, 2009.

Photo: Brian Jones/Las Vegas News Bureau

The reaction to previews of Cirque du Soleil’s Viva Elvis at the just-opened Aria in CityCenter has been fairly positive, but Cirque officials will resume changes and rehearsals on Jan. 3 to have it ready for the Feb. 19 premiere. Construction delays are being cited for a four-week holdup in getting onstage at the new theater, forcing the production to push back the premiere originally scheduled to coincide with Elvis’ birthday on Jan. 8.

The gigantic task is in the hands of American writer and director Vincent Paterson, who previously staged elaborate touring shows for Madonna and Michael Jackson. In a one-on-one interview at the theater, Vincent revealed that he began the project nearly four years ago. Back then, he was brought on to launch a touring Elvis show and the Las Vegas residency show.

Time and challenges changed the best-laid plans, and the touring show was placed on hold, while the green light was given to the Las Vegas production. Vincent told me that he’s tried to create a show that Elvis himself may have produced today: “The unique strength and power of Elvis was in his voice. I was greatly inspired by the originality and complexity of this musical legend. What I tried to paint, in all humility, is the show he might have created today.”

One of the highlights of the show will be the reflections of Elvis when he served in the U.S. Army. He was inducted on March 24, 1958, 51 years ago as service #53,310,761. Despite his fame, he insisted on being treated as an able and ordinary soldier. While in the Army, he donated his pay to charity, purchased all the TV sets for personnel on his base and bought extra fatigues, as supplies were meager, for every member of his outfit.

Elvis created a teen rebellion in the 1950s and ’60s with his explosive mix of gospel, country, Southern music and R&B that catapulted rock and roll to the forefront of popular music. Vincent had to ensure that those sonic impacts were meticulously presented in the show through the careful and clever combinations of the visuals from thousands of photographs, films and concerts, along with Elvis’ recordings.

Based on the 18-minute preview I saw, Vincent has pulled that off brilliantly. Mark Brickman, the image projection director, said: “The production is epic in scale, and the show is an unpredictable hybrid of theater, dance, opera and circus. It’s all come together as a balance between light and dark, truth and myth and the energy of music and bodies moving in space.”

I even learned that the sound engineers buried subwoofers in the floor of the theater to use low frequency resonance through the concrete structure, adding subsonic sound vibrations that will enhance the audience’s experience.

Here’s my conversation with Vincent:

Robin Leach: So let me make an observation to provoke you. This is not the Cirque we’ve come to know and love. This is different than what Cirque has done before.

Vincent Paterson: This is definitely Cirque. Cirque is a cutting-edge company. This is my first adventure with Cirque, and I love this company. Unlike others when they become successful, they just stay in that genre and never grow. Here what I think is fascinating and what I applaud is that Cirque is always willing to try something new to grow. So Viva Elvis is a music- and dance-driven show -- I would say 65 percent dance and 35 percent acrobatics show, but those also have a lot of new elements.

The show is music driven first. We came up with the arrangements first, and then we decided what we wanted to have happen. How they pertained to the show, how they would be put in different elements. First we divided things biographically, but then we felt that was a bit staged, and we wanted to break that up and make it more abstract.

RL: So now you use the biography in a story thread?

VP: And imparting some of the personal aspects and characteristics of Elvis Presley. It’s hard to create a show of someone that you don’t have living and breathing with you, so we are using him as a way to bring the humanity. It’s really nice when people say that they felt he was in the room during the show. There are some really touching stories in there, especially toward the end.

RL: Was the biggest moment for you in working the three years when Priscilla cried at the run-through and when she said Elvis would’ve been proud?

VP: That was one of the validations for me. I had several conversations with Priscilla before that. I took her through the book and storyboard and all of that and loved her input. It inspired her to relate info to me of which I was unaware, and that influenced some of the things we put in the show. Since you don’t have Elvis, Priscilla is one degree of separation. We had people in a smaller sense, but she was with him as a kid, and even after the divorce, they still stayed very close, and she spent a huge portion of her life with him, and no one had the intimacy she had with him. So that was one of the highest highs for us so far.

RL: Six weeks of previews, so there’s time to keep tweaking before the February premiere?

VP: You know we were a month late coming in the theater, which was a setback since half of the week is technical rehearsals. We only get half of the time, 40 hours, to work with artists and be creative, and the other half is to be creative technical. It’s not a lot of creative time with the artists on the stage. And we have made a lot of changes, and that is what I like about Cirque. You don’t have to put up a show and leave it that way. We try all manner of ideas. We throw out things and change others, so we are still in that experimental stage.

RL: Please clear up two rumors about the band and the choreographers. Do we see the band or not? Have you changed the choreographers?

VP: We see the band on most of the numbers, but sometimes that’s not possible when there is no room for them. There is one section in the military act of the Elvis story with drum and bugle sounds, and we don’t have the capacity for all that onstage at once, so we use a musical sampling. We didn’t change choreographers. We brought in others to do other pieces. I did a sprinkling, but I didn’t want to choreograph it all. … Because this is a music- and dance-driven show, I thought a variety of voices would give us a variety onstage.

I just wanted to direct, and that has been a huge task. For me, it’s been over three years! My first six months were dedicated to putting a tour together. Then we scratched that as we got into the Vegas timeline. There were two shows: a touring show and this one. We just let the touring show go away, so with the Vegas deadlines in sight, we just said do the Vegas show. The touring show was about Elvis in Vegas, and it would have gone on tour before we launched the full show here.

RL: You’re sitting here now with the first real audiences watching the previews. How do you feel?

VP: I am excited as hell. I feel great. I am very happy. We have been so involved in the process 14 hours a day six days a week for the last months and years. We need some time to let the show breathe. We need time for the performers who have been working their butts off to have an opportunity to be appreciated, to know it’s not about just working behind the curtain and to get people’s responses and be rewarded that way. For us on the creative side, it’s time to take a step back and let it do its thing, let it do its own pacing and see how it works with the audience, then come back and make a change of what we want to change and work with that as of Jan. 3.

RL: If you have people dancing in these seats and singing out loud, would that also be validation?

VP: That would be the ultimate validation.

Tomorrow, we will conclude our four-part look at Viva Elvis with an extraordinarily candid interview with Robert F.X. Sillerman, the head of Elvis Presley Enterprises who masterminded the partnership with Cirque. He confided his belief that Las Vegas has been under-Elvised and reveals for the first time his amazing plans for even more Elvis projects here.

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

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