Magical mystery bore

All Together Now is a behind-the-scenes look
at the Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show, and is for ’60s kitsch fans only

LOVE ME DON’T: All Together Now

by MARK SLUTSKY

I like the Beatles. I grew up with them. I may not listen to them very much these days, but their music will always have a place in my heart. Do you know what I don’t like, though? Beatles kitsch. Nostalgic ’60s boomer revivalism is bad enough, but there’s something about pseudo-profound artistic takes on the Beatles’ catalogue—think Across the Universe, for instance—that strike me as particularly heinous.

So I wasn’t exactly first in line to get tickets to Love (shudder), the Cirque du Soleil’s fancy-dancey spectacle based on the Beatles’ catalogue, as I expected that the collision of moptop kitsch and bouncy Cirque whimsy would make me want to shoot myself in the face and/or barf. I admit upfront here that I’m not exactly the ideal audience for All Together Now, director Adrian Wills’s behind-the-scenes documentary following the show’s production.

If you’re down with Love, you’ll find All Together Now to be a slick and very competent, if uncritical and adulatory look at the Cirque’s process. We hear from Paul and Ringo, Yoko Ono and Linda Harrison, George Martin and his son, Cirque honcho Guy Laliberté, and pretty much everybody else involved in the process. (Yoko and Linda’s misgivings about the project are touched on, though I wish the movie spent more time on the obvious frictions there).

But, yeah, like I said, I found it hard to get too worked up about the making of Love. Though the Cirque du Soleil obviously does a lot of good work with street kids or whatever, and their performers are insanely talented, I just can’t get with their overblown Vegas-y spectacles.

The way they interpret the Beatles’ lyrics, a sort of psychedelic literalism (when they sing “All the lonely people” in “Eleanor Rigby” you see all the lonely people… dancing!) is extremely not to my taste, nor are Paul McCartney’s endless self-congratulatory interviews about what a great band the Beatles were.

If you can’t afford tickets to the show, though, you may be pleased by the lengthy sequences from Love that make it into the movie. And honestly, if you’re a big fan of this stuff, you’ll probably find lots to like; if not, it’s a long and winding road indeed even at 84 minutes.

ALL TOGETHER NOW SCREENS AT
CINEMA IMPERIAL TONIGHT, THURSDAY,
OCT. 9, 7:30 P.M., AND OPENS
ELSEWHERE THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 10