Picasso's painting Le Rêve ("The Dream") of a woman smiling as she drowses in her chair almost inspired its owner, Vegas magnate Steve Wynn, to name a hotel/casino after it. But instead he gave his own name to the resort and built a plush round jewelbox of a theater inside to house a spectacular combination of Olympic-level diving, synchronized swimming, acrobatics, and dance in and above a pool of water 27 feet deep. This is the world of Le Rêve, and it is an intimate world, like all dreams; the closest seats are four feet away and the farthest just twelve rows back.
Le Rêve was created by several Cirque du Soleil veterans, including director Franco Dragone, the man who made Cirque profitable. Dragone directed many of Cirque's best-known shows before leaving to form his own production company, which also created Céline Dion's "A New Day" at Caesar's Palace. Here his Nouvelle Circus style melds with Wynn's ideas (Wynn owns the rights, and has made some changes to Dragone's original) to form something sexy and emotionally truthful, a show with both a story and a soul.
The action begins with a woman shunning her lover, and then falling into a dream state where spirits both friendly and threatening compete for her attention. Along her journey she meets a horned Pan-like character, a protective sea-god, and numerous naiads, angels, and seducers, all flipping and splashing and performing physical feats from scorching tangos to twisting dives. Physical artistry is met by stunning visuals as long horns blow fire and sound, a flock of birds drifts past, and the petals of flowers twenty feet high wave slowly above their human stems.
It takes a mindbending amount of effort (and oxygen tanks) to stage and maintain Le Rêve. The million gallons of water in the pool are fully filtered four times daily, and circulated by pumps that could fill your backyard swimming pool in five minutes. The dancing shoes have dozens of holes drilled in their soles to let the water drain out. Every one of the 86 performers is SCUBA-certified. But the flashy dance routines and sheer technical complexity don't overshadow the heart of the story, which is revealed in flashes; the heroine sitting alone, sadly taking off her shoes as couples spin and embrace around her. Two men performing a hand-balancing routine that is both tender and angry, like lovers fighting for the soul of their relationship. Four Rat Pack-looking clowns in white tuxedoes reviving a dead bird.
Le Rêve celebrates both the search for love and the fantastic versatility of water as an artistic medium. Swim in it, dive into it, pour it in sheets, spray it, smack it so it sprays other people, make it into mist and snow, use the legs of a dozen dancers to churn it into a furious froth like Busby Berkeley gone mad. Draw massive, bulging nets into the air so water jets from a thousand holes and then set them spinning as muscular men run along the outside. Send performers corkscrewing into the water from a massive, gnarled metal tree. Sophisticated lighting colors the water and plays over the audience as platforms lift and lower to create surfaces of different shapes and heights, creating in turn different levels of water in which the performers can play. Le Rêve balances comedy and peril as it invites you to join the dream, flying and splashing through an elegant, dangerous world of gods, spirits, and lovers.
