The Beatles: Love – Cirque du Soleil – Mirage Theater, Las Vegas – January 24, 2019

All You Need is Love, and I got 90 minutes of it, attacking my visual and auditory cortices from every direction (not to mention those parts of my brain related to long-term memory, as it has been over 50 years since the Beatles first gained our attention). The problem with the show is that, if you focus too much on one thing, you don’t notice five other things that are happening at the same time. There’s no pause, rewind, or instant replay. I’m sure there must have been a kitchen sink thrown in somewhere that I missed.

The varied and spectacular exhibitions of strength, grace, and agility by the show’s performer/athletes, as they danced, twisted, stretched, and threw their bodies around, made me think of Katelyn Ohashi, the UCLA gymnast who is the current queen of YouTube because of her amazing routine at the recent Collegiate Challenge at the Anaheim Convention Center, which undoubtedly will lead her to the greatest reward a gymnast can attain, no not being awarded a gold medal at the Olympics, or getting a job with Cirque du Soleil, but rather winning the mirror ball on Dancing With the Stars.

I first saw Cirque du Soleil when it was performing Saltimbanco under a tent in the early 1990s. For some bizarre reason my most vivid memory of that show is the guy who climbed up chairs that he piled on top of each other. I always wondered what his mother thought as she grounded him, literarily and figuratively, sending him to his room, in the hopes of interrupting him as he went about wrecking furniture in pursuit of a career in the lost art of hand balancing.

In addition to the music, special effects, and huge cast, Love features hundreds of garish costumes, not unlike what you see on the street in front of the hotel.