More than a decade after premiering a hit residency on the Strip, Boyz II Men are back with four shows at the Chelsea at the Cosmopolitan.
The man who plays the ringmaster Willy Whipsnade in “Circus 1903” muses about his show’s great quandary.
“How do we stand out?” Whipsnade, whose real name is David Williamson, asks. “Well, the elephants. Our story. Our talent. And, our heart.”
“Circus 1903” is — as its name implies — is an intentionally antiquated circus, performed essentially as it would have been more than a century ago.
The production debuts an open-ended run at Paris Theater next Tuesday. The show offered a sneak preview in a rehearsal studio in North Las Vegas Tuesday.
Aside from advanced lighting and sound technology, “Circus 1903” takes audiences back to a time before Cirque du Soleil seized the medium and created multimillion dollar spectacles up and down the Strip. Suffice to say, in “Circus 1903,” there is no man-made lake serving as a stage (as in “O”) or stage that rises to face the audience (as in “Ka”). And that’s OK with the performers in “1903.”
“I love Cirque, but our show reminds people of why they love the circus in the first place,” Williamson says. “It is an homage to the real circus.”
The elephants Williamson refers to are actually human-operated puppets, named Queenie and Peanut. They are brought to life by Mervyn Millar and Tracy Waller of Significant Object, a British design company perhaps best known in the U.S. for creating the equine stars of the Broadway show “War Horse.”
The real tug here is what Williamson calls “the root of the circus” — the disciplined and gifted acrobats and artists who inhabit the big top – or, on the Strip, the former “Jersey Boys” theater. There are a teeter board duo and a human contortionist in the show, the sort of artists you can’t stop watching. The elephants, arriving through a haze of mist, are imposing and even a little disquieting even though you realize there are people inside those beasts.
The man who strings it all together is Williamson, a crafty stage vet who is a highly regarded magician with a biting wit. His favorite show in Las Vegas is “Absinthe,” his friends include David Copperfield, Lance Burton and Mac King.
More than a decade after premiering a hit residency on the Strip, Boyz II Men are back with four shows at the Chelsea at the Cosmopolitan.
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