“Viva Elvis™”: It’s leaving the building

You’ve got slightly more than a year to catch Viva Elvis™, which Cirque du Soleil® will put out of its box office misery (60% attendance) at the end of 2012, seven years short of its planned, decade-long run. According to the Toronto Globe & Mail, plans for a temporary shutdown, followed by a melding of Viva Elvis™ with Cirque’s fatefully named Zed (left homeless by the Japanese tsunami) have been scrapped. There will be plenty of time to second-guess the marketing and the venue of Viva Elvis™ (a charmless, generic Aria theater with wretched acoustics), and weigh the question of whether seven Cirque shows on the Strip is one too many. But the bottom line is that Viva Elvis™ just wasn’t particularly good. Withering critical reception was matched by audience indifference. Cirque chose to be content with a brazenly condescending, take-the-money-and-run attitude toward the job and it showed. As I’ve said before, Elvis hasn’t left Aria; he was never there.

Update: The plot thickens. Seems that MGM Resorts International wanted the show out, telling Cirque to replace it with something, anything else. The blame game has begun, with one Cirque admirer faulting “the soulless entity that is City Centre [sic]” for the show’s downfall. It’s entirely possible that the giant Viva Elvis™ billboard — otherwise known as The Harmon — could still be standing after the show itself has closed.