MONTREAL - With a wolfish grin and a bald head, Guy Laliberte, a cofounder and the owner of Cirque du Soleil, looks like a man with a plan for world domination.

“There are three capitals of entertainment in the world: Las Vegas, New York and London,” says Mr. Laliberte, in the vast campus here where two-fifths of his 5,000 employees work. “So far the only one I truly conquered is Vegas.”

But Mr. Laliberte is hardly a newcomer to New York, where he has put on 19 shows, or London, where he’s done 18, since Cirque’s founding in the early 1980s. He didn’t make the leap from accordion-playing street performer to one of the world’s most powerful entertainment impresarios by setting his sights low.

Cirque will open three huge new productions this year. “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” which has already taken in a $50million advance, begins touring in October in Montreal.
“Iris,” an alternative history of the movies, is to be Cirque’s first permanent show in Los Angeles.

But the highest-stakes gamble may be “Zarkana,” which opens at Radio City Music Hall in New York this month. While it will go on to Madrid and Moscow, it’s no accident that “Zarkana” starts in New York, where Cirque’s first flop, “Banana Shpeel,” a blend of musical theater and circus, opened and closed last year.

Mr. Laliberte, who owns an island and seven homes, was hard to reach during some of “Shpeel’s” troubles; he was orbiting Earth, after paying $35 million to be a space tourist. “We’re returning like men,” he says, to “face the critics who killed us face to face.”

(Mr. Laliberte has a reputation for fierceness, but Philippe Decoufle, the director of “Iris,” calls him a “very nice bulldozer.”)

Cirque is already a mighty rival to traditional theater; its 22 current productions, including its standing Las Vegas shows and the touring productions, annually sell about as many tickets as all Broadway shows combined.

The permanent shows cost between $40 million and $50 million. (Cirque has touched every continent except Antarctica.) Cirque’s total revenue, including tickets and merchandise, is expected to pass $1 billion next year.

With its New Agey world music, big-budget spectacle, world-class athletes and poetic clowns, Cirque has redefined one of the world’s oldest art forms. The company’s influence ranges widely, from the special effects in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” to the Metropolitan Opera, both of which employ former Cirque employees. Mr. Laliberte’s greatest triumph has been in Las Vegas. Seven permanent shows have opened there in 17 years; not one has closed.

Dominic Champagne, who has directed two of them, “Love” and “Zumanity,” said you could put almost anything “in a jar, put it onstage, call it Cirque du Soleil and it would be a hit.”

Some are not convinced. “If Cirque is going to succeed in New York, they need to understand story - and they don’t,” said Richard Crawford, an actor who was fired from “Banana Shpeel.” “ They come from street performers, and now they are street performance with laser beams and millions of dollars.”

It’s a nagging worry for Mr. Laliberte too. “Are we condemned to only doing big acrobatic shows?” he says. “Creatively we have the capacity to do much more.”

Cirque begins with the conviction that every show needs something novel. “Zumanity” added an erotic edge; “O” a vast pool. After a concept is established, the team develops what it calls the acrobatic skeleton of 10 acts; 6 are imported (acrobat troupes hired from China and the like). As Cirque has brought in directors from theater, opera and film, the script has become more important. Sequence is critical.

“ Circus has much more highs and lows than in a play,” Mr. Laliberte says. “You need your ‘wow,’ your tender moment and humor.”

Music, costumes and lighting work to create otherworldly designs that are a mess of contradictions: nostalgic and futuristic, whimsical and melodramatic, sexy and asexual. There is just a hint of a plot, and a few themes (“Saltimbanco”: immigration. “Ovo”: biodiversity.).

Despite his showman’s eye, Mr. Laliberte’s first passion is business. He began Cirque in the early 1980s with a five-year plan for multiple shows. He was 24.

The company had its breakthrough in Los Angeles in 1987, with “Cirque Reinvente.” Disney and Columbia Pictures made offers to buy the company. Mr. Laliberte turned them both down, insisting on creative control.

Cirque’s history is riddled with power struggles . “I survived three putsches,” he says.

As the organization has grown, Mr. Laliberte has delegated more. “There’s a limit to what I can do,” he says. “I am in the business of live or die by the public.”


By JASON ZINOMAN