Hating magic shows, Believe director Denoncourt took on ambitious Angel-Cirque project

By Robin Leach

Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008 | 4:17 p.m.

Serge Denoncourt is Believe’s co-writer and director, and although he has 80 major productions on his resume, at age 18 he was planning on a medical career. But then he decided to audition for a college theater program, was accepted and on his 1983 graduation decided to become an actor. Four years later he directed his first piece and from that point on he was cooked on the behind-the-scenes creativity and challenges.

Now just 46 years of age, he is highly regarded worldwide for the visual beauty of his shows, which are typically marked by heightened imagery, vivid use of color and a deep examination of subtext.

He has staged everything from operas to variety shows and was even the acting coach for episodes of the Cirque du Soleil TV series Solstrom. He is the first to admit that he doesn’t like magic shows in general. “They lack emotion and any sense of a storyline,” he told me. I took on Criss and Believe from the position of one who doesn’t like those kinds of shows because they treat magic as an end in itself. My aim here is to take magic -– and Cirque du Soleil- – in a completely different direction. With Criss Angel’s Believe, I have sought to return a sense of nobility to magic.”

To understand Serge you must first digest his favorite quotation: “I find the links between attraction and rejection, good and evil, and sexual urges extremely interesting. This is the world I investigate in my creations.” It was from that point I began our exclusive interview:

Criss Angel Web site

Believe Web site

RL: How do you marry the intricacies with what Criss does to what you technically have to achieve as Cirque?

SD: Cirque didn’t ask me to do a “Cirque” show. They chose Criss and they gave me freedom to do a show and go somewhere else from a traditional magic show. We have no obligation to do “Cirque.” Twenty years ago they reinvented the circus. Now, they are trying the same reinventing magic. They don’t want to do magic Cirque du Soleil, they want to do amazing magic created by Cirque.

RL: An attempt to remove the traditional Cirque look and feel and be more theater of magic?

SD: Yes. We didn’t think about it. We had meetings. We talked about the show Criss wanted to do for the last 15 years, what was his script. I came in the picture, I said that’s great but we should do this. It is the show we wanted to do, but there is no Guy LaLiberte saying, “I want more clowns.” Criss is not a Cirque du Soleil persona. If you pick Criss, I have to work with that guy who is not Lance Burton or Hans Klok. Criss is something about style, and why fans expect something extra-special from him.

RL: So when Luxor President Felix Rappaport says this will be magic you have never ever seen before, how do you get that far away from what we perceive magic is in Vegas?

SD: There are two completely new different illusions that have never been seen or thought of before. But the show is about the way to present magic. There are six other amazing illusions in the world and we play around that. So we have the best magician, the best technicians, and the craziest ones so we will present it in a way never seen before. In our case, we also have a story line and we use the magic to tell the story. It is a journey. It is more than a magic show. It is a journey through a lot of emotion and events. It is risky. It is edgy. We don’t have cute girls in bathing suits or spandex pants as assistants. We have dancers, but we don’t stop the magic to have a dance routine, it is woven in as part of the story. Criss is also a part of some numbers. It is not another typical Vegas show with illusion after illusion or box after box, act after act. It is far more complicated. It is somewhere between 90-95 minutes long -- a non-stop story as we go inside his brain, literally, to see what is in it. It is scary. We didn’t want to make it a dream, but we wanted to create a surrealistic world. It is his world plus some characters. It is a mixture of Feline and Maigret plus some very crazy things.

RL: The Crowmen to me look a little dark, the woman with the zippered mouth looks dark.

SD: It is. It is half and half, because in Criss’s brain he has the darkness but there is also a romantic aspect of the guy that we haven’t seen before in his Mindfreak shows. There is balancing between those two sides of himself. There are two women in his life, the dark one with the zipper, and a beautiful one born in a flower. So there are two sides of everything to Criss and we see them both.

RL: When you first met Criss you saw a 5-year-old’s innocence. Then you get the story and script that he wrote 15 years ago. Was the child you saw in that script? And how do two creative geniuses avoid pulling and fighting at each other?

SD: Respect and admiration. There is respect between us and I admire what he did. He didn’t need me, but I was part of the deal. When I came with some of my ideas, two heads are better than one. We added to each other. When it was good, he didn’t say no because it wasn’t his idea, I did the same with him. There was no competition. We didn’t fight, we really worked together. That may sound boring but we have a great camaraderie and wonderful working relationship. You meet someone and things happen magically. Sometimes you just share something with somebody and it works. That is why we are so enthusiastic. I met somebody incredible two years ago. I think the show will change over the next 10 years but I don’t think he will call anyone else to fix it, because we have had so much fun doing it. Thank God it was not two years with an a**shole, because sometimes that happens in this business. We just did the show challenging each other. We built it together and now its almost completely ready.

I don’t always agree, but when people talk about magic sometimes there is tackiness in their minds. When I came to this project, I said I want to shut their mouths on that score. It is possible to do magic that is not tacky. I went to see a couple of magic shows in Vegas and I struggled to get through them because it is not theater. When they do their show, they only think about the magic, not the experience and emotion of what you will take home afterwards. A good show is a show where you enjoy your evening and you leave saying I was touched. We are trying that; we are in new territory so we don’t know when it will rain, where it will rain or if it will be an earthquake.

RL: So this leads to the obvious question. Here you are finally -- exactly five weeks before the official premiere. Where do you stand as the chief cook in the crazy kitchen?

SD: My roast beef is not quite ready to be on the plate, I can’t find the potato but I know they are somewhere in the kitchen. I have to find it because in a few hours people are coming to eat, then they will say to me if I did a great roast beef. I have thought about the menu for a long time now, it is almost ready and the audience will tell us if we did a great job .If audience likes it, we did our work. We need them now in the next five weeks of previews to gauge their emotions, their experience for the last part of the answers.

RL: The heartache of having these previews postponed and postponed, you are through those delays finally now. Be honest was it because the entire project is just too ambitious?

SD: I will remove the “too” but yes it was ambitious. Cirque is great for that though. The Luxor president knew we were trying to do something ambitious. As Criss said, we are doing things never done before. We had it in our mind, we shared. It was trial and error. We still have just a few things to fix and we’ll have achieved that by the premiere on Halloween

RL: You are comfortable about 10/31?

SD: I am. I cannot wait to meet the audience. I cannot wait to see if the dream and the enthusiasm meet and are accepted. In my heart I know they will because even Criss’s mother who has seen everything told me she’d never seen him do this before.”