Cirque du Soulless (in LA), & New Year’s Eve (the film & ahead)

He then told me he’d run into Matthew Bourne that morning in London, and said, “Matthew’s company used to come every year, but now we just get more and more idiot musicals, it’s awful.” (Ironically, the new Broadway season at LA’s premiere touring theatre the Pantages begins in February with Idle’s own Spamalot, so presumably he doesn’t mean that idiot musical, though at the Ahmanson they’ve even got a musical with idiot in the title, American Idiot, arriving in LA in March).

During my five days in LA, however, Wicked was in town, which I didn’t need to see; but I did go to the Kodak Theatre — the home of the Oscars since 2002, and built with it specifically in mind - which for the rest of the year now houses Cirque du Soleil’s first resident show in LA, Iris, which attempts the paradoxical feat of making a live show out of a loose retro tribute to the cinema.

I’m afraid it made me ask another heretical question, and one I’ve been frightened of officially confronting for a while now: is my love affair with Cirque du Soleil finally coming to an end? On the one hand, they are without question the single greatest and most successful live entertainment company operating in the world today. They have not only totally reinvented their chosen genre of live human-based circus but also created two of the greatest shows of my entire life, O and Love, both resident in Las Vegas.

So that’s an admittedly high bar that has been set; but on the other hand, their other shows have started to become imitative and repetitive of each other, created to a formula that, however good individual acts within them may be, they come with a deja vu feeling to them that can’t be shifted. And it’s very keenly felt, I’m afraid, in Iris, even though there’s some amazing aerial bungee ballets that put the flying in Spiderman - Turn off the Dark in the shade, and even though they’ve commissioned a new film score from Danny Elfman, who created the scores to such films as Edward Scissorhands which provided such a brilliant inspiration to the aforementioned Matthew Bourne to create a ballet out of.

But if I wanted to see a film, I’d have gone to the cinema, of which there is, of course, no shortage in LA. Two of the most historic are alongside the Kodak and directly opposite it, and I visited both. At the El Capitan, I saw the new Muppets Movie, which in a curious hall-of-mirrors way, is partly set inside the El Capitan itself, since that is where the Muppets are being reunited in the film.

And at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, I saw New Year’s Eve, set last December 31 in Times Square, where an all-star cast celebrate the night in different ways. As orchestrated by director Garry Marshall, I found this an enjoyable ride, but not all my film critic colleagues were similarly enamoured. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden dubbed it “a depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it’s not.)” His curmudgeonly conclusion? “My advice: don’t believe the hype. Having been there — once — I would nominate Times Square as the last place on earth where most sensible people would want to be when the clock strikes midnight. At home asleep with your head under a pillow to blot out the noise is a much cozier alternative.”

Actually, I once spent New Year’s Eve in Times Square myself — on Millennium Eve, as it happens, when 1999 become 2000. And there was no better place to be. But it’s true, too, that I was in New York last New Year’s Eve, too, and chose not to go there: instead, I listened to the roar of the crowd at midnight from the balcony of the apartment I was staying at that was within hearing distance of Times Square. And this year, I’ll be in an apartment with a clear view of Sydney’s Harbour Bridge that night.