On Sunday, I caught a preview of Cirque du Soleil's fifth and newest addition to their Las Vegas stronghold of entertainment: The Beatles LOVE. This was my first Cirque du Soleil experience, aside from the occasional PBS glimpse, so my thoughts here cannot really be compared with other Cirque shows. Also keep in mind that there are several weeks left in the preview period, so what I saw may change.

So how was it? For starters, the George Martin mix was fantastic. Each seat had two speakers inside the headrest, so it was like listening to a surround sound remastering of much of The Beatles catalogue. The song selection in the mix was eclectic and close to ideal. To give you an idea: one scene started with "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" and then smoothly segued into the hard-rock guitar melody at the end of "I Want You." The soundtrack was essentially a 90-minute long DJ mix, giving you "Hey Jude," "Strawberry Fields Forever," and "Yesterday" but also "Octopus's Garden," "Tomorrow Never Knows," and "Sun King." (Yes, the pastiche focused almost primarily on their mid- to late-period output.) Also notable was the occasional use of alternate takes and constructed dialogue based on the four's in-studio banter.

Continuing with the good: The sets, costumes, and lighting were top-notch, focusing on the trippy side of Beatles culture, along with late-60's British psychedelia. There was quite a bit of odd puppetry that reminded me of Shel Silverstein illustrations, like long gypsy trains and a phalanx of 20 shoes dancing (hard to explain).

The problem with the show was with what I thought beforehand as Cirque's strengths: the dancing and acrobatics. With the exception of two or three excellent set pieces, most of the dance sequences involved 15 or more people on stage and trapezes at once, doing their crazy shit all at the same time. And for some reason, the producers attempted to make the show "urban" by having many of those dancers crunking Krumping and breakdancing much of the time. I like to watch crunking Krumping as much as the next guy, but it was sort of incongruous with Beatles music. On the other hand, the great set pieces I referred to above involved roller skates, see-saws, and trampolines (not at the same time) and I loved every minute of it.

One last cool thing: at the end of the show, they projected a video of the four Beatles singing as an animated photomosaic (or, I guess, a videomosaic) where the image was made up of many little tiles, each of which was displaying animated snippets. A quick Google search shows that this is not quite new, but I had never seen one before.