Cirque du Soleil Struggles Entering Quarter Century Club

Le Grand Chapiteau has begun to dip and sag under fallout from the global recession. Will Founder and CEO Guy Laliberté be able to save his company? Not if he keeps up his quantity over quality initiative that has plagued the French Canadian troupe over the past five years. At present moment, the company has 19 shows running, seven of which are sit-down productions within Las Vegas hotel casinos, far more than ever before.

Full disclosure: I’ve been a huge fan of Le Cirque for a long time. For years I couldn’t say a bad word about it, but now my thoughts have changed. Discovering the company in late 2002 with La Nouba, there was a period where I was routinely traveling across the country, seeing 6-8 productions a year at $100-150 bucks a ticket. I helped represent the company to underserved demographics and did outreach to new, young audiences. I even worked with the company’s online presence across message boards and forums. I had travelled thousands of miles and had seen almost 30 productions. Then in 2008, the pieces began falling apart, drifting, and so did I. Despite having more disposable income and better geo-flexibility for traveling shows, I’ve only seen 2 since 2009. I didn’t enjoy either; the magic was gone. For generalist understanding, I won’t dive into specifics with names of productions, staffing changes, and artists. Instead, I’ve tried to use show trailers for accessibility to chart progression. If you want to talk in-depth, email me — I love chatting with other fans, especially with those who’ve been disappointed as of late.

The massive company announced late last week it would be laying off over 400 employees (about 8% of the its workforce), shelving scheduled productions, and closing several poor received currently-running shows in an effort to rein in spiraling costs on the financially debt-laden projects. Most of the job cuts will take place at the Montreal HQ, home to 2,000 of the company’s 5,000-strong global work force. Straight out of the gate, Cirque’s press was immediate in saying these huge cuts and slashes were not due to artistic, internal problems, but instead could be attributed to external forces beyond their control, namely surging production costs and the strong Canadian dollar.

“The Cirque is going through a difficult period but not a difficult financial period,” spokeswoman Renée-Claude Ménard said Wednesday at the company’s Montreal headquarters. She noted that the company achieved record revenue of “nearly $1 billion” over the past year and sold 14.2 million tickets to more than 20 shows around the world. “Basically we’re lucky that with a very difficult economic and financial situation we’re still pulling a rabbit out of the hat,” she said. In addition to runaway expenses associated with its rapid expansion, the company is facing a shortage of outside investors in its production and ongoing difficulties caused by the strength of the Canadian dollar. The company incurs 95 percent of its expenses in Canada and 95 percent of its revenue elsewhere, Ms. Ménard said. “Each one-cent increase in the dollar has a $3-million impact on our profits,” she said. The company, founded almost 30 years ago by stilt-walker Guy Laliberté and fellow street buskers, also announced Wednesday it is closing four shows to trim expenses. “We would have been much happier to tell you those shows weren’t closing,” Ms. Ménard said. “But it’s not a revenue issue, it’s an expense issue.” – Bertrand Marotte

Yes, these external factors are at play, but it would be remiss to operate under the assume that the Cirque themselves are not at fault. The pivotal issue, I believe, is due to the reckless and furious expansion of the company since mid-2007. With a string of Dragone-directed hits in the mid 90s and Dominic Champagne’s vision guiding the company through the early 2000s, the CdS was moving steadily forward, debuting a show every 12-16 months. At this time, storytelling and spectacle walked hand in hand. The company was in a great place with it’s marketshare and name-recognition growing around the world. The company’s founder and CEO Guy Laliberté rose from a poor street performer to one of the richest men in North America.

All fairy tales however, especially in business, must come to an end. Greed sets in and original values are lost. A company’s mission statement is traded in for a stronger balance sheet and higher net worth. Twenty years after the innovative company’s formation, the tides shifted and spectacle took the forefront and artistry/storytelling was abandoned. Production budgets initially spent on new act R&D, talent travel, and innovation was spent on massive, unimaginable theatre renovations and special effects so far reaching from the company’s start in the mid 1980s. All one must do is take a look at La Magie Continue to Saltimbanco to KA, the transformation is astonishing. KA’s 2004 production costs surpassed previous records of $165M, dwarfing that of even Broadway’s Spiderman: Turn of the Dark ($65m) almost ten years later.

Saltimbanco, 1991. Humble beginnings.

Alegria, 1994. Astonishment through performance. Entering the Golden Era.

 O, 1998. Design and technology’s emerge, but they walk beautifully hand in hand.

Varekai, 2003. The final show in the 10 year Golden Era.

KA, 2004. Amazement through technology and design. The decline begins.

Viva Elvis, 2010. What happened to my beloved company?

Prior to this slip up, Cirque’s development had a near perfect record. Shows rarely stopped touring and were often sent out on third and forth trips North America, European, Asian, and Australian tours; not a single permanent show in residence had closed. The company faltered. Adaptation replaced innovation. The root of the “wow” shifted from the performers they celebrated at their core, to stage automation and moving elements. Partnerships with unlikely sources (The Beatles, Criss Angel, Broadway and Elvis Presley) changed the company’s artistic landscape. And most importantly, having several shows playing on every continent (and the complete over-saturation in Las Vegas) was more important than what was playing on each stage every night.

Laliberté, now more concerned with being the first clown in space than running his billion dollar empire.

Cirque du Soleil was founded in 1984 by Laliberté – now, of course, the world’s first billionaire stilt walker – and in the first 25 years of its life it opened an average of one new show a year, sending out a new touring show or further colonizing the Las Vegas strip. In 2001, Daniel Lamarre, who had previously run the private television network TVA, came on board as CEO. Lamarre told Bloomberg around that time that he wanted to expand the half-a-billion dollar company at a rate of 25 percent a year. Some observers might locate the beginning of Cirque’s fall at that moment, but for me it came around 2008, when the company decided to triple its output to three new shows a year. It aimed to create permanent shows in new markets: New York and Los Angeles, and, further abroad, in Tokyo and Macau. And it tried to create new kinds of shows – magic, variety, musical. “If we succeed in creating new categories of show, content diversification, then there is no limit,” Lamarre told me at the time.” – J. Kelly Nestruck

The company needs to stop now and reevaluate itself, rediscover its roots. High level management and artistic staffing changes and turnover have led the company astray. Original act and artistry designers have since left the company and begun their own practices (Creations du Dragone) or returned to their respective corners of the globe. The first to go must be Lamarre; he simply does not understand the logistic challenges of running such an operation. Production at HQ must cease and projects currently under development must go through a full “Lion’s Den” ceremony circa 1998-2002 standards of quality. Resident show (especially Las Vegas) must be reexamined with a fine-tooth comb and their sit-down aspirations questioned, as these are the ones to suffer the brunt of failure as of late. In 2010, its Banana Shpeel vaudeville-type venture flopped in Chicago, New York and Toronto before it was finally cancelled. Zed shut down in Tokyo just over a year ago, earlier than expected, while Zaia closed in Macau. Viva Elvis folded in Las Vegas this summer, while Iris, a cinema-themed show playing in Hollywood, is closing this month after poor ticket sales.The by-products of these stints have bled into the company as a whole. Cultural reporter Marc Cassivi wrote in La Presse this week that Cirque’s prestige has eroded in recent years, partly because it is so closely associated with the “kitsch” of Las Vegas. He also said the company has become so structured that it does not allow individual performers to reach their full potential.

Apple Didn’t Buy Waze — Amen.

Flipping through my Flipboard (is there a better way to say that?) Friday morning on my train ride into work, I saw a trend I couldn’t believe. Article after article speculating on the rumors that Apple was in late-stage negotiations to acquire Waze, the social-navigation startup out of Tel Aviv (now Palo Alto).

The Cupertino-giant, still reeling from its Forstall-driven Mapgate this summer has been grasping at company after company to help solve their problem. It’s very unlike Apple to do this with startups, a reason why their continued pursuit of Foursquare for major partnership is so intriguing. With Google Maps resurgence on iOS in late December, Apple’s stock app has been hemorrhaging users at an alarming rate. The fear among Apple executives is that once these users return to the handsomely updated iOS 5-style comfort, they’ll never return to Apple Maps, regardless of what improvements are to come. This advanced acceleration is problematic — substantial marketshare leaves the stock app daily. Rather than continuing to build in-house, the mentality is now to acquire other’s IP, tech and talent to push out a game-changing update NOW.

Waze is the world’s fastest-growing community-based traffic and navigation app. It relies on the idea of crowdsourcing information — drivers help each other find the most accurate and up-to-date information for anything related to the road. With over 30 million users, Waze’s strategic model believes that by working together, drivers can get to work faster and more safely everyday. WHAT?

The hazard screen, courtesy of Rocco Pendola.

“Waze is designed, even if not intentionally, to distract. For mere mortals, I reckon it’s next to impossible to not be wholly distracted while using Waze. For goodness sake, they use the slogan, Waze: Drive Social.” Each little icon on the map invites a tap. What’s this? What’s that? Who’s over there? Wow, there’s somebody in the car next to me using Waze! Damn, she’s cute!  When you see a fellow Waze user on the map, you can tap their icon and message them, see their “points” and  ”rank.” The more you interact with Waze, the more points you score and the higher you rank.” – Rocco Pendola, The Street

So it’s gamified driving? There’s no good reason for Apple to buy Waze, now or down the road. With the fragile state the company is in, why take such a risky venture with a dangerous app. Encouraging not just 30M users, but ALL users in the Apple ecosystem to be socially-conscious while they drive. It’s a lawsuit, a potential killer, waiting to happen.

Waze asks users to report police activity, accidents, road hazards and traffic jams, in real time; “It’s like a personal heads-up from a few million of your friends on the road,” the company says. They even recommend you attach photos to these “social reports.” They want you to connect with friends on Facebook to see where each is on the road at any given time on the road?  Foursquare for your car, if you will.

Thankfully, the deal is off. There’s been wild speculation as to the reason, most tied to money. Apple capping out it’s offer at $500m with Waze refusing to accept less than $750m. I’m all for social advancement, especially in new sectors, but for the road? And requiring so much user action? I can’t even imagine it.

Mailbox app: Get Excited About Email Management

With only a few days until 2013, what new, innovative mobile surprises have we seen this year?

……Yep.

Over the past few years there’s been expansive growth in mobile every quarter. Innovation, disruption, adaptive technologies and clean UIs have pushed social networking, management, payment and news apps further faster than many imagined. This year, mobile dev went from boom to bust. It was a year of clunky dot updates and app-for-app substitutions, many of which were downgrades from their previous iterations (just think Apple Maps as the prime example). On top of that, this year was focused one of the most lackluster and disappointing sectors:

Dear 2012, You were the year of list making and email organization apps. Dear 2013, Please don’t be as fucking boring as 2012.

— schneidermike (@schneidermike) December 29, 2012

Zzzzzzzzz.

Many consider access to email to the most important tool (and original purpose) in having a smartphone. Now, we hate it. Some will say this is because we’ve found better, more platform-oriented messaging apps, or that we have strived to develop more casual means of communication. Maybe the reason we’ve chosen to flee email is because after years of using it on mobile, no one has done it right. The monetization simply isn’t available as it is elsewhere. The only way to bring it money is as a pay app, and a majority of people refuse to fork over a few bucks to a developer….for no real reason.

This year we saw launch after launch of email apps, each more fundamentally flawed than the last. Whether paid or free, App Store ratings showed user discontent. Each release made an advancement in one direction at the expense of all others. Even with talent, partnerships, and investment starts aligning, a true “leader of pack” in email management failed to materialize. Take Gmail’s acquisition of the Sparrow team, for example. While Sparrow’s iOS app never had the power or simplicity its OSX client was praised for, it brought true Gmail support to the iPhone in a way Apple’s Mail.app never did. Sparrow on iOS lacked great syncing capabilities and never really helped me get through my messages. After humiliating themselves on the 1.0 release, Google acquired the small company in a talent acquisition and the promising Sparrow app fell into disrepair (despite a small .0.x release). Gmail’s recent 2.0 release for the iPhone was expected to be the perfect marriage, but lacked major functionality behind a pretty design. Disappointed, many of us hung our heads and returned to the iOS stock app.

Mailbox, by Orchestra.

While I always strive for Inbox Zero on the fly, being overwhelmed by email is a problem everyone faces. Some require action, research, response, or (if you’re lucky) just archive. However most people use their inbox as a “Save For Later,” with all messages grouped together, no distinction between them. Unfortunately, no apps (at least that I’ve discovered) really help users deal with those decisions. Instead, it’s a sort by timestamp and call it a day.

“A lot of people loved Sparrow, but I could never get too excited about it. It provided a pretty rich set of tools for moving emails around and making sure they got archived and were searchable — basically improving on things that the iPhone’s native mail app did poorly. But for me, Sparrow was always a little too feature-rich. It didn’t make getting through my email any easier, it just gave me more stuff to do with it.” – Ryan Lawler, TechCrunch

They won’t get lost!

After a year of dozens email management apps, many of which never made it past one iPhone sync, I’m excited about ONE in 2013. Mailbox, by Orchestra, announced just over a week ago. Mailbox, from the same company who brought us the amazing task management to-do list app in 2011, takes a stripped-down approach. UX for 2013 is really driving artful simplicity home, and Mailbox will be the first app to do that. As soon as an email comes in, the road forks: keep in your inbox, save for later, or get rid of it. How do you sort? A short swipe: to the left, to the right, or all the way across to toss it out.

If the concept of “save for later” frightens you, don’t worry, Mailbox has already ensured all your mail won’t find it’s way into a toxic wasteland. You have to decide: later today, tomorrow, this weekend, next week, and so on. Mailbox will then prompt you when it’s time to take action. ”Email was designed 30 years ago for computers chained to desks,” Orchestra CEO Gentry Underwood says. “Everything about it is slow and clunky. If you want to make it fast and mobile-friendly, the entire experience needs to be modernized.” [I'm bouncing up and down in my seat writing this -- this man gets it!] From what I’ve seen and read from various industry beta reviewers, Mailbox excels in a few key areas. First, it’s stupid fast, surpassing the speed of Apple’s Mail.app. by first processing messages through the cloud, before pushing them (Yes. Push.) to your phone.

“Composing and sending a message feels (and looks) more like sending a tweet than an email. Mailbox also excels at displaying message threads as if they were texting conversations. When you tap into a message or conversation, you notice that instead of conventional emails, you see small chat bubbles displayed tactfully. Mailbox does its best to hide signatures and only show the meat of each message, but tapping any individual message lets you see any message in its expanded state.” – Ellis Hamburger, The Verge

Mailbox is expected to release early next year. If it can keep a price point between $5-8, I think we’ll see mass adoption and a real shakeup in the category. I’ve already heard rumblings of OSX release as well — I think Orchestra knows they have a hit with this one. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

The Dark ‘n’ Stormy: There Are Two Ways To Do Everything

Photo courtesy of Shutterbean.

The Dark & Stormy – a highball cocktail – is trademarked by Gosling’s Export. In layman’s terms: ginger beer and rum.

The drink, now beginning to resurge in the States, sees its highest popularity with the sailing community up and down the East Coast, having originally been brought home by sailors who frequented Bermuda. Most upscale bars in port towns from Portland, ME to Newport, RI to Annapolis, MD and beyond have the Dark ‘n’ Stormy on their menu.

I first met this drink last year at one of Boston finest restaurant, lounges and watering holes, Eastern Standard Kitchen and Drinks, right in Kenmore Square. The spot’s mix of locals, out-of-towners, and classy college students gives the place a sophisticated, yet welcoming and warm feel. If you haven’t been, it’s certainly worth a night or two of your time when you’re next in the city. For a year I was utterly content, thrilled, with ESKD’s concoction. It was just what I was looking for, every time. In April, everything changed.

Please don’t call this a “pirate bar” – it’s anything but.

Smuggler’s Cove, a Caribbean speakeasy on Gough Street in San Francisco. A Prohibition-era Havana. With over 400 rums in-house and a few of the sharpest mixologists in the city, this place had it down. A quiet night, I began with their traditional, most basic DnS. What happened next blew my mind and was anything but “traditional” – he began with a fresh batch of cooling ginger beer, made only an hour earlier. Many upscale bars are known for making their own syrups, flavorings and essences, but this was a first. Super fizzy, super ginger-y, and super dry.  For those of you who’ve never tried it alone, ginger beer is essentially ginger ale but with a sharper, more upfront ginger taste, and far less sweet.  It isn’t alcoholic, but because of its more strong flavor, it holds up in cocktails as the soda never could. Perfect balance. In my head, the drink is changed. And after a bit of research, it’s easy enough to do – quicker than heading to three or four stores to find one who actually carried ginger beer by can.

Marcus Samuelsson

The below recipe comes courtesy of Marcus Samuelsson, an Ethiopian chef raised in Sweden and trained in Austria. While Samuelsson isn’t a mixologist, I’ve found his recipe to by among my favorites.

The HOMEMADE Ginger Beer

• Juice of 4 limes
• 1 cup orange juice
• 4 cups water
• Two 3-inch pieces ginger, peeled and coarsely grated
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 4 cloves
• 4 cardamom pods

1. Combine the lime juice, orange juice, water, ginger, sugar, cloves, and cardamom in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Pour into a bowl, and let cool.

2. Cover and refrigerate the ginger beer for at least 2 hours. Strain before serving.

Off Topic: Thoughts on the Newtown, CT Tragedy

Today’s post is off-topic and I am using this blog as a platform for dissemination of what I was mulling over last night while trying to fall asleep.

After gathering my thoughts and taking a day to think about yesterday’s tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, I feel I’m finally able to fully articulate an opinion. After listening to and reading the remarks of men and women smarter than I, my current notion borders on a less popular school of thought. I am FOR much harsher legislation on firearms in line with much of the country’s population, but am trying to look at the issue from a few steps further back. Some partially disagree with this – I’m not even 100% sure of everything right now – but I think it may be worthy of some thought.

Portions of my opinion below have been adapted from the thoughts of others (many privately said/posted); due to the sensitivity of this topic, amalgamation, and public nature of this platform, I will not be citing them).

———————————

“A peaceful man with 10 firearms is much less dangerous to society than a violent man with no firearms”.

The issue at hand is not the possession of firearms. The issue is a human issue. A sociological issue. The problem is not that people have firearms. The problem is that in our country, people want to kill other people.

With many tragedies within recent memory, our society has begun to use firearms more and more as the scapegoat with each passing day. It is human nature for us to shift blame – we would rather choose to take out our anger on a tool than a perpetrator, an instrument rather than a mechanism. We assume, or at least would like to assume, that human nature is inherently good. In cases like yesterday, we instantly become numb and cannot comprehend how a human being in our society can carry out such a violent act of atrocity. Instead, we blame the least humanistic aspect of the equation: a cold piece of metal. We ignore and fail to recognize the true, underlying issues at hand and take responsibility for them.

It is much easier to blame firearms, the Second Amendment, “crazy” people, than it is to admit that we (collectively) as a country might have a problem.

In instances like this, we cry for guns to be banned. However, with a sociological problem, a problem with the people, firearms are simply a tool for destruction. While banning firearms may be calming and comforting to us (jailing the scapegoat), it is a shortsighted solution. What if people decided to strap homemade bombs to themselves? You only need to take a quick look in the news to realize how likely of a scenario this could be. Would we be any safer? Would we call for a ban on fertilizer, hydrogen peroxide, matches, alarm clocks, nails, ball bearings, and cell phones?

How about the kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London metro system in 2005? Or in 2001 when men with box cutters killed thousands in the most harrowing act of terrorism ever seen on American soil. Even yesterday, on the same day we saw violence in Newtown, a man in the Henan province of China stood outside an elementary school and stabbed 22 students between the ages of 6-11 years old. Similar to the war on drugs, making a product illegal does not stop its proliferation and resulting crime. A gun ban would quell gun violence, but perpetrators bent on causing destruction would only move to another medium, similar to the uptick in UK gun violence following their own firearm crackdown. As stated at the top of this article, I am for harsher firearm legislation and bans, but unfortunately it does not stop the problem at its root. When someone has intent to do incredible damage, they will find a way to do so.

I believe the larger issue at hand is our country’s obsession with violence, morbidity, and death. One simply has to turn on the television to a primetime drama or watch a trailer of an upcoming, highly anticipated movie. Is there a gunshot, an explosion, or a funeral scene within the first two minutes? I’m not blaming the media for violence; the media is people, not self, -serving and delivers what people want to see. We, as a culture, have become comfortable with violence, whether through the 24-hour cable news cycle or through fictional dramatization. Even with tragedies such as this, our society demands more than what is necessary in terms of detailing. First, there are the dramatic recreations of the incident, and how exactly the carnage unfolded. For some reason, maybe because of what we are used to, we need to know precisely what happened and the exact timeline of it. We need to see grainy cell phone footage from inside and hear the screams over a 9-1-1 call. We need to know the first and last name of the victims. We need to know their ages. News networks eavesdrop and research (often times incorrectly), to be the first ones to “break the news.” The media ambushes the parents and families of victims for soundbites because we need to know just how heartbroken and devastated they are feeling, still not being able to fully comprehend what has happened. We do not need to know these things. We need to leave these people alone.

On social media channels, I’ve seen many post a photo of a red, white, and blue gun, showing the number of deaths caused at the hands of firearms across the world. Compared to other pacifist nations, the US number (not adjusted for population differences) is staggeringly high. On first blush, firearms, and each country’s corresponding laws, seem to be the primary issue. However, on a closer look at these countries and a glance at their cultural rearing, the violence factor is incomparable. The UK for instance (our biggest comparison partner), has a vastly different, and generally less violent culture than the United States. As an example, consider the prevalence of jingoism (extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy) in the UK and the US. When was the last time the UK began a war? For Switzerland and Sweden – when was the last time either of these countries took a side or became involved in any international conflict?

Summation: I’ve believe the idea that guns kill should be replaced with the concept that weapons kill people, and it is important to know that for anything to be considered a weapon, it must have an instrument and a mechanism. A knife with a hand to wield it. An airplane with a hijacker to fly it. A pillow with hands to force it over a face. And yes, a gun with a finger to pull the trigger. Anything can be – or can become – a weapon with a person behind it looking to inflict damage. However more and more repeatedly as these tragedies build, many people place more emphasis on the instrument (the gun) rather than the mechanism (the hand that wields it). We cannot remove all instruments to prevent loss of life, for nothing would be left around us. The only thing we can do is to prevent people from becoming the mechanism in that equation. To me, guns aren’t the ultimate problem; they’re a symptom of greater society and cultural ills.

My heart and thoughts go out to all of the victims and families of this senseless tragedy in Newtown, CT. Knowing a family who calls the town home, I wish them and all others the best over the many days, weeks, and months to come as their try to make sense of the deplorable devastation. I hope our nation (and news outlets) give them the space and time they need to recollect themselves and move forward. I wish everyone the best this holiday season and hope all hold their families and loved ones close.