Cirque du Soleil will be returning to the Academy Awards, just in time to mark the 10th anniversary of the time they set the Oscar stage on fire.
The French-Canadian circus troupe will perform "a wholly unique and exclusive performance" at the 84th Oscar show, producers Brian Grazer and Don Mischer announced on Friday. The performance will include more than 50 Cirque artists from around the world, the largest group of performers ever assembled for a single act.
Composer Danny Elfman, who wrote the music for the Cirque show "IRIS," which plays at the Kodak Theater during the 11 months when the Oscars are not being staged, will supply music for the performance.
And one imagines that now that the adventurous and imaginative circus troupe has settled into the Kodak, the rehearsal process will go a little more smoothly than it did last time.
Cirque du Soleil first came to the Oscars in 2001, when the late producer Laura Ziskin booked them to perform at the first Academy Awards to be staged in the brand-new Kodak Theater.
Like the new performance, that one was a multi-performer extravaganza, using 29 Cirque artists from five different shows. It involved acrobats, clowns and trapeze artists hanging from the top of the theater, all keyed to film footage that was supposed to echo the acts being performed on the stage.
During the Friday night rehearsals two days before the show, though, things were rough. Aerialist Yuri Maiorov tried out a stunt that had him soaring in an arc out over the audience – but the act had to be scaled back when he kept landing hard in the audience, in the vicinity of where Nicole Kidman would be sitting.
Another performer spun hoops around her body and then flung them into the crowd, where a colleague standing in the aisle was supposed to catch them. But during one of the rehearsals, one hoop crashed squarely on the seat card bearing Julia Roberts' name.
"If Julia Roberts was sitting there," the performer, Nathan Henderson, insisted afterwards, "I definitely would have caught it."
But the biggest problem came with a stunt that involved Cirque artist Mike Brown, who lit a heavy round torch attached to a chain, and then spun it in circles just a few inches above the stage.
The first time he tried it, when three fire marshals watching attentively, the stage continued to burn for several seconds after Brown extinguished his torch. It left a scorched ring on the stage some 20 feet in diameter, and destroyed 17 of the shiny blue tiles that covered the Kodak stage.
When the show's longtime associate producer, Michael Seligman, walked to the stage, director Lou Horvitz came on the p.a. system. "Michael Seligman, your insurance broker is on line one," he joked.
In the audience, Oscar show officials hastily conferred with Cirque personnel, who said there was "something in your paint" that caused the stage to burn.
