The Cirque du Soleil folks recently debuted a new kind of show, at least for them: A Broadway circusy-vaudeville extravaganza with, supposedly, an actual plot of sorts. Banana Shpeel opened six weeks ago at the Beacon Theater in New York…and there it will close tomorrow at a loss of somewhere around $20-30 million. What went wrong? This article tries to assess some of that. But it also says that they intend to try, try again.
Obviously, having not seen the show in question, I'm in no position to discuss if the reporter is right or wrong but not knowing what I'm talking about never stops me so I'd like to toss in one thought. Years ago when New York Mayor Ed Koch was finally unreturned to office, he gave a disarmingly candid interview in which he was asked why. I'm paraphrasing but his answer went something like this: "I could blame all sorts of reasons, like the sanitation strike and the city council actions…but the truth is that after a while, no matter who you are, New Yorkers just get sick of you."
I don't think it's just New Yorkers. Sometimes, someone is just so ominpresent and persistent that we all get sick of them. I wasn't even in New York and I was weary of seeing Ed Koch turning up everywhere. I'm going to write a piece here one of these days about the seeming collapse of not only Jay Leno's Tonight Show but to some degree, all the late night shows and I think that's part of it. There was a time when Cirque du Soleil was something special, something different, something to look forward to for months. Now, they're practically opening new companies of it in strip malls…and there aren't that many different ways for tumblers to tumble or for aerialists to aerialate.
I was thinking that when I saw Zumanity in Vegas a few weeks ago. Half the show was the same old, same old…and the other half, the half that was supposed to be unique, was clumsy. If there's anything a Cirque du Soleil show should not be it's clumsy. I dunno how much the oversaturation factor played into the failure of Banana Shpeel but I do know that I used to wait eagerly to see a Cirque du Soleil production and now it's like, "Don't worry…if you miss this one, there'll be another one along in twenty minutes."