There is one Cirque du Soleil show that stands out from the rest for fans of fantasy, battlefield glory, makeup design, and special effects. brings those elements together with colorful costumes, exciting action and exquisite pageantry to relate an original tale, a heroes’ journey in a mythical Far East. Before the protagonists can return home there is an odyssey to experience, complete with flaming arrows, wall walking, overhead views of combat, underwater scenes and a ship tossed about by a storm at sea as audiences inside KÀ Theater at MGM Grand Vegas remain dry.

It’s fitting that a spectacle on as grand a scale as would find a home at MGM Grand. It’s like watching live three-dimensional cinema that places the audience amid martial artists who leap and lunge without the aid of camerawork and editing. As their characters fight for their lives, cast members rely on coordination, expertise and focus to ensure fictional defeated enemies don’t become real-life casualties while they navigate a massive rotating stage.

The narrative depicts a boy and a girl, a pair of twins who are separated and follow individual paths as they come of age, learn about love and witness war. Swordplay is real and requires split-second timing and fast reflexes of its practitioners, as does the Wheel of Death. Warriors require a heightened sense of balance not to be thrown from the rotating mechanism. Less lucky are a few passengers of the storm-tossed ship.

Defying gravity is a recurring element in most Cirque shows, with reaching a creative high thanks in large part to hydraulics that enable vertical choreography for the epic battle scenes. The Archer’s Daughter glides above the ground like a graceful arrow released from a bow. Aerialists take the form of puppets who dance an airborne duet, while actual puppetry is involved in the animation of a sea arachnid that gets a solo turn in the spotlight.

There’s even a shadow puppet segment that will motivate some audience members to re-create the Cirque du Soleil techniques at home. Less easily duplicated are the facial creations of makeup designer Nathalie Gagné, whose inspired blend of kabuki theater and Cirque motifs make the features of empirical courtiers sharply defined from any sightline in KÀ Theater.

Acrobatics, comical digressions and demonstrations of martial arts mastery round out the visual feast of while exotic, often stirring music builds dramatic tension before booming during battle or setting the atmosphere for more bucolic intervals.

Now an entertainment institution on the south end of the Strip, continues to create its own legacy since launching under the direction of creator Robert Lepage nearly 18 years ago. He’s refined the production in the years since the curtain opened for the first time in the massive theater, taking the knowledge that came with the learning curve for the tech and tweaking it for maximum effectiveness. The results of his dedication to perfection are worth seeing—and revisiting.

MGM Grand, 702.891.1111

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