Las Vegas Weekly

Fall from grace

Criss Angel’s show is so bad, you actually need to see it

The good news: Criss Angel Believe is as bad as—or worse than—you’ve heard. In a couple weeks when Cirque du Soleil slashes ticket prices, go see it. You’ll be able to say you’ve seen one of the worst, most misguided stage productions ever. I was truly gobsmacked by just how badly off the mark it was on every level.

Criss Angel is a horrible, horrible performer. This is deeper than his just trying to be an “edgy” rock ’n’ roll magician. An early mentalist trick where he has to interact with an audience member is painful to watch as he tries to shoehorn their responses into his agenda for the trick. In this he hasn’t been helped by the folks at Cirque, who clearly have no joke or dialogue writers on staff and didn’t think to hire any.

More damning, neither Angel nor Cirque have any idea how to present magic. There are no illusions in O or KÀ. It doesn’t matter if aerial performers are clipped into harnesses that can be seen, because the point is not to fool the audience but to amaze them. An actual magic show is different. Fooling the audience is absolutely the point. That’s why magicians take time to show you how what they’re doing shouldn’t be possible at all. A magic trick doesn’t require suspension of disbelief; it systematically goes through and knocks down the pillars of disbelief. It aggressively shows you why this is magic—because otherwise it’s just wires. Angel and Cirque set up the tricks with long, boring staging business, and then the tricks themselves are done so poorly that even I, knowing nothing about magic, can see how they’re done. Worse, even if I couldn’t figure out how a trick was done, it was obscured in so much fog or flame and took so long to develop that it didn’t matter how it was done—my dead grandmother could have limped from the audience to the stage using her walker and taken Angel’s spot on stage.

But it gets worse. Amazingly, Cirque have even forgotten how to do what they do best. It’s as if they’ve dumbed down their performances to match the rest of the show. One early sequence contains some aerialist work. The performers walk on, clip into their harness and are flown into the sky. What do they do? They spin. That’s it. For about a minute. Then they’re let down. Color me impressed. At one point Angel does some very pedestrian work with doves. So of course some aerialists and dancers have to come in dressed like doves. It’s like being hit with a big old brick of stupid. This is the best, most creative solution you could find to offset dove tricks? To be fair, there are a few absolutely stunning tableaus and sequences, enough to remind you that Cirque has some incredibly talented designers and technicians working for them, but so much more is done so poorly. For example, the framing sequence—it takes too long to get to the actual meat of the show, closes awkwardly and, perhaps responding to audience criticism, is explained in simpleton terms throughout. (Criss Angel should never be allowed to speak onstage ever again.) If you have to explain something, the problem isn’t that you don’t have an explanation, it’s that your work is flawed enough to need one.

Sneak Peak at Believe

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Lastly: A major plot point of Believe is that Angel is chasing his dream woman. In order to emphasize just how perfect a love this is, the performer is white; not only is she white, but she also dresses in white, has white hair and emerges, innocent and virginal, from a flower. This is beyond clichéd, and would only elicit groans if it weren’t for her counterpart, the evil woman in the show. She’s portrayed by a black performer, called a bitch to her face when she refuses a kiss from Angel and throughout the show is made more and more bestial, until she appears on a video screen as a snarling, growling monster. So what is being represented here? The white woman is a paragon of beauty, innocence and compliance; the black woman is evil, violent and bestial. Did no one involved with the production imagine how that would look? It may not be incendiary, or advocate policy, but these scenes do call on a context of racial depiction that is tactless at best.

Cirque has a reputation for tweaking and fixing shows even after they’ve opened, but in this case the problems are so deep, so endemic, I don’t see any way to fix it. If they do, though, well, that truly would be magic.