If you’ve been to a variety show in a Spiegeltent in the last decade or so, chances are you’ve been lucky enough to see a production from the cirque ensemble Spiegelworld.
The organisation emerged in 2006, with their show Absinthe making a splash in a travelling Spiegeltent at Pier 17 in New York City. While Australians had enjoyed Spiegeltents at festivals since the Adelaide Fringe in 2000, for New Yorkers it proved something relatively new – and it was an immediate hit.
For those unaware, the show was, in essence, a Cirque variety show for adults, performed in the round in a Spiegeltent, which is (borrowed from Wikipedia), “a large travelling tent, constructed from wood and canvas and decorated with mirrors and stained glass, intended as an entertainment venue.” It’s an incredible place to see a show.
Absinthe ran for three seasons in New York, with Spiegelworld’s footprint growing with each iteration, as it started travelling around the world. A number of productions also followed for the company, emulating Absinthe’s format around new concepts. You might have seen Empire when it hit Australia in 2013 (as I did), or Absinthe’s follow-up in Las Vegas, OPM (fka Opium), which closed at the Cosmopolitan on New Years Eve 2023.
But while Cirque du Soleil’s Canadian roots are well known, what you might not know is that the founder of Spiegelworld, Ross Mollison, is from Australia.
Mollison founded the company following his work touring Cirque du Soleil in Australia, as well as touring shows like Puppetry of the Penis around the USA. I caught up with Mollison recently and he reflected on this early run in the US, and the light bulb moment that led wake to the company.
“I was working with Cirque du Soleil, promoting that around Australia and New Zealand, on the Quidam tour. We did about a million tickets – and the tickets weren’t cheap. It was really, really successful. So I was going, as a producer, I love the circus – what can I do that’s different?”
“And then I took Puppetry of the Penis to America. And that was the perfect show to take to a brand new country, because it had two naked guys and two microphones. It cost nothing. But we made it look good. We dragged it out to an hour and a half so we could charge 45 bucks. And I got to learn all the big markets of America doing that. So I was looking at something to tour America with, and then seeing the Spiegeltent, it was a light bulb moment. From there, I came up with Spiegelworld and off we went.”
But they didn’t tour it at first, rather setting up the Spiegeltent at Pier 17 in New York City. And it wasn’t just for Absinthe. As we came to know of it at events like Sydney Festival, in 2006 they ran a series of performances that included the initial Absinthe run at the Fulton Fish Market, but also an incredible live music series. In fact, it closed in September 2006 with two performances from one of Australia’s most loved bands.
“Spiegeltents are just such fantastically intimate venues, to see any entertainment – and in New York City in 2006, our final night show was The Cat Empire. I lived in St Kilda from the age of about 20, and I just love The Cat Empire to bits. So to get them in the Spiegeltent was truly special – and every Australian in New York came. It was an enormous night and fantastic for music, fantastic for a certain sort of circus. And from there, we launched this whole idea of touring America.”
With that, the tours started, with Absinthe heading to Miami and Australia, though not without some difficulties along the way.
“It’s really hard to tour a Spiegeltent – like they’re the worst kind of structures in the world to produce shows in. They’re beautiful and intimate but they can’t hold much weight. They collapse at the roof. They’re made of wood, so fire departments hate you. And they take three enormous Belgian guys a couple days to put up and take down. So they’re also expensive.”
While the talks to take the show to Las Vegas started all the way back in 2008 – for when the Fontainebleau was originally supposed to open in 2009; a hotel that didn’t end up opening until late last year – it wouldn’t be until 2011 that it moved onto the Strip. Much of this delay was down to the 2008 financial crash, which Mollison reflected on actually being beneficial for its initial launch.
“The decimation from the 2008 financial crisis in the US was extraordinary. Homes that had been $300,000 were selling for a nickel… I’ve never seen anything like it. And so the thought of anybody doing something new in Vegas after that was like – you’d have to be crazy. It really felt like a bad time to do something new. But I think that was the secret of our success. Because when we opened, nobody was doing anything new.”
“I always loved that when John Pinder established the Comedy Festival in Melbourne, he said it had to open April 1st, April Fool’s Day. I don’t know if it still does, but I always have loved that festival. So we opened (in the Spiegeltent at Ceasar’s Palace) on April 1st, 2011. It was incredibly new and exciting and intimate… and totally different to what our competitors were doing. And so people just loved it. And the people of Vegas loved it. It’s a 40, 50 million person a year tourism market in Las Vegas, but it was the people of Vegas who supported it at first. We gave them a reason to go to the Strip because someone was doing something new. But it still took a year to really solidify and get to a position where we went, okay, this could be a thing.”
Though as it garnered popularity, they were forced to rethink the Spiegeltent model entirely.
“The first stage we had in Las Vegas was a 26 meter Spiegeltent, which the roof did collapse on… I literally cried in front of the chief of the fire commissioner as I was trying to convince her to let me do the show. And finally, she relented and said, yes, you can do it because we said you could. And you can take it down in six months and never bring it back to Vegas.”
In the end, a new, more permanent stage was erected – one that more than 12 years later continues to operate in Caesars Palace’s Roman Plaza.
So impactful was Absinthe, that they left their mark on the very company that in part inspired Spiegelworld’s journey – Cirque du Soleil. With the Montreal company’s latest Las Vegas spectacle, Mad Apple, Spiegelworld’s influence can be felt throughout (read my review HERE). And as Mollison explained, there is no coincidence there.
“I know that show’s director and he used to come in (to Absinthe). We set up a little a little desk for him with a lamp so he could take notes because he came back and saw it so often. That’s the highest form of flattery to have someone come and copy what you do. But, that’s not what we do. I am not going to produce the second best O. Like for me to go and do an enormous production spectacle, it would be crazy. How could I produce something better than O? That show is a piece of poetry and maybe the greatest live entertainment, in many respects, the circus has ever produced in throughout the course of humanity. So that’s why I did something entirely different.”
In the post-pandemic environment, the company has done just that, bringing audiences brand new experiences that take you outside of the traditional Spiegeltent environment.
Just before the pandemic, in 2019, they opened Atomic Saloon at the Venetian, after a run of the production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This took over a brick and mortar space in the hotel, and sees you immersed in a saloon-like environment. While it’s still a fairly typical Cirque show, it’s arguably their most risqué one to say the least. and allows audiences to sit on (or off) stage for a unique vantage point of the over-the-top and hilarious performances. This show continues impressing audiences with ten shows a week (Tuesday to Saturday at 7:30 PM & 9:30 PM).
Then in 2021, at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, they opened Superfrico, next to what at the time was their Opium/OPM theatre. This is an immersive restaurant experience that serves phenomenal Italian cuisine – from Mozzarella made at your table to a perfect Chicken Parmigiana – paired with playful performances. You never quite know what you’ll get on any given night, with a rotating display of masters of the craft adding to the ambience and playfully interacting with the guests. One performer even came and sat with me, chugging a bottle of wine, while my partner had gone to the restroom. Be prepared to get up close and personal in this one.
The concept is now in both Vegas and in Atlantic City, and Mollison didn’t rule out further expansion of the new concept to other locations in the future.
“For me, some of the greatest experiences of my life have been when I’ve gone to a circus. Like if you go to Roncalli in Germany, and then you go and you eat at the artist cafe and have dinner there… or you go and see Giffords in the UK and then you go to Circus Sauce, their little cafe, and have dinner afterwards. It’s a big communal dinner… or the Tiger Palace in Frankfurt. I just love that notion of a whole night out absorbed in the world of circus.”
“It really gives you a chance as an adult to get out and play, and see some of the incredible humans that we’ve curated for you to come and meet. You are not going to believe what they do. And then you can go out and they’ll come and say hello to you and have dinner, have a few drinks. And to me, that sounds like a fantastic night out. So with Superfrico, I was really trying to expand the whole experience. I wanted to create a restaurant that was delicious because, as circuses tried to find a way to survive, it kind of got reduced to shitty hot dogs or horrible popcorn, which are fine for a five-year-old, but it’s not what we want to go and eat for dinner at night. And so I thought, well, there’s a market that wants to come out… and really there is a deficit of fun not just in our lives, but in Vegas.”
“It’s about the art, it’s about surprising people and delighting them, and not necessarily doing what’s expected like close proximity magic or you know that sort of crap that you might see. And that’s where we came up with that idea. And Superfrico has been a monster hit. That is a massive restaurant and we just keep working on it. We’re about to go into another workshop for that and The Hook, our other show we have down in Atlantic City, too.”
But they didn’t stop there. What if you took Superfrico, combined it with a show like Absinthe or Atomic Saloon, and set it to a 1970s Disco soundtrack? Well that’s where DiscoShow – their brand new Las Vegas production comes into play. Opening in August of this year, the production involves three bars, a restaurant (cleverly called Diner Ross), and an immersive, Disco-themed show. What New York’s Sleep No More was to Shakespearean theatre, DiscoShow is to fans of Disco music.
“It was always anticipated that we’d be creating a whole world around this show. The concept started when we opened Vegas Nocturne at Rose.Rabbit.Lie, which we produced in 2013 at the Cosmopolitan, where Superfrico is now. And we were really thinking about how to merge the worlds of hospitality, food and beverage with entertainment. And I just love this idea of going back in time to 1970s New York to go to the Disco. Obviously, being an Australian of a certain age, I went to all the cliches of the period from Saturday Night Fever and then Studio 54 and Bianca Jagger riding a white horse into the club and all that sort of stuff.”
“And then I started reading book after book after book and I just got more and more into David Mancuso, who really was a kind of birthplace of Disco in his NY loft apartment. He ran these parties all the time. And I just though, wow, this is a far more interesting story than just a whole bunch of rich people going to Studio 54 and hanging out, doing cocaine – which was more at the end of Disco, the late 70s.”
“I just thought it was a great topic. It’s a great fun thing to talk about for entertainment. And I think the music is just so it’s everlasting. It’s pervasive. It’s in all our music today and whether it’s Nile Rogers composing stuff with Daft Punk or Dua Lipa or Kylie? Kylie does it, you know, everybody does a bit of disco, right?”
The production you can experience now at the at The LINQ is an elaboration of a concept that started with a workshop in New York City in 2018 called We Are Here. Directed by Steven Hoggett, who choreographed Harry Potter and The Cursed Child on the West End and Broadway, amongst others, the show’s music was curated by the one and only Nile Rogers.
The show’s launch in Las Vegas was delayed through the pandemic, though at one point it was going to be part of Sydney Festival in 2021. In the end, the show’s name would become “DiscoShow”, it would be conceptually grander than anything previously put on paper – and while Hoggett would direct this evolution, Rogers would not be officially involved in the final product. Though, as Mollison explained, some of his music remains.
“Nile was involved in the first version. He was actually going to musically direct it. And we did go on to use a few of his tracks in the show you see today. But at the end of the day, we decided to broaden it out beyond just the music of Nile, because I think he wants to tell his own story.”
“You know, if you’ve read Niles’ book, it’s a pretty incredible story. His upbringing and how he became this incredible composer… and he’s just a lovely, lovely man. He’s also had enormous adversity in his life, but he just keeps going. The guy is a machine. I’ve seen him in London and I’ve seen him in LA. He’s just everywhere. He’s just traveling the world still – he must be getting close to 80. And is a cancer survivor. What a great ambassador for the whole music industry.”
Where Spiegelworld goes from here is anyone’s guess – but the almost Sleep No More level production that is Discoworld shows that they are not afraid to do something big and bold, shaking up any expectations from what a circus company might present.
“We just keep iterating. And, it’s the same with every show we’ve created. And, you know, if you saw Absinthe in 2006 in New York and you see it today, it’s almost unrecognizable. So, you know, we just keep working the whole time. And I think that’s part of our success. A lot of companies like your Cirque du Soleil’s are very hardware dependent. But we’re very software dependent. And there’s always a new iteration of our software coming out. We’re working on a big new act for Absinthe right now, which I can’t wait for everyone to see.”
To develop those next ideas, as well as fine tune their existing catalogue of productions, they now have a whole plot of land, having bought the entire town of Nipton in California’s Mojave Desert at the start of last year.
“We bought a little town, which is about an hour out of Vegas. I was actually just out there last week and we did a workshop. We brought all these artists in and worked up a whole new idea for something we’re interested in. Though I just finished telling the Times of London that we wouldn’t be going back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival again. Because it’s too damn expensive and it’s kind of on the slide. But by the end of the workshop I was emailing William Burdett-Coutts who runs Assembly, to say, hey, you know, actually, I’ve rethought this. We may come back. So yeah, I think we might take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe next year, to workshop this idea up.”
“Because ultimately, whether it’s Melbourne, Sydney. Vegas, or Edinburgh in Scotland, they kind of have a similarity about them to me. The audiences in Melbourne, they go out to have a good time. They’ll have a few beers and they’ll get in there and they’ll let you know if they love it. And if they hate it. And the same in Edinburgh. And the same in Vegas. If you’re not lifting the roof off the place you know you’re wasting your time.”
Just don’t expect Spiegelworld to do anything expected to get those ovations.
As we ended our interview, I asked Mollision what impact he hoped Spiegelworld would leave on the future of Las Vegas.
“I hope I can leave new producers who come to Vegas with the idea that you need to do something different. Like if you come and try and be the second best Absinthe – yeah, you’ll sell a few tickets – but why would you why would you do that? Why would you copy Absinthe? It makes no sense to me. I don’t do it myself… I mean, Absinthe is a legend now. It’s like going to Paris and trying to produce something like the Moulin Rouge.“
DiscoShow enjoys ten performances a week at The LINQ (3535 Las Vegas Blvd), Wednesday to Sunday at 7pm and 9:30pm.
For tickets to Absinthe, Atomic Saloon and DiscoShow, as well as reservation details for Superfrico, head to their official website.
The author attended Superfrico and Atomic Saloon as a guest of Spiegelworld, with support from the LVCVA. Photos supplied by Spiegelworld unless otherwise credited.
