Will Cirque du Soleil set up its tent at the O.C. Great Park?
A bit more than a year from now, the hot-air balloon ride may not be all that's going up, up and away at the Orange County Great Park.
The park's board of directors wants to make the Irvine site the Orange County home for Cirque du Soleil's touring tent shows, envisioning a new acrobatic extravaganza from the Quebecois company every two or three years, starting in January 2010.
Technically, the park has to get the OK from Irvine's City Council at its meeting Tuesday to enter negotiations with Cirque -- but presumably that will be a mere rubber stamp, seeing as all five City Council members serve on the Great Park's nine-member nonprofit board and were part of its unanimous pro-Cirque vote Thursday.
After that, the negotiations with Cirque have to pan out. Whether they will could depend largely on the outcome of an intergovernmental bidding rivalry between the city of Irvine and the state-run Orange County Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa.
The Costa Mesa fairgrounds have hosted Cirque's three most recent sallies into O.C. -- "Quidam" in 1997, "Varekai" in 2004 and "Corteo" in 2007. Before that, Cirque tented down in the parking lot of the South Coast Plaza shopping center in Costa Mesa for "Saltimbanco" (1993) and "Alegria" (1995).
Steve Larsen, spokesman for the Great Park, says Cirque initiated the dialogue in August -- word having apparently made its way to Montreal about the park's summer-long "Night Flights" dance-concert series. "I think any organization would be interested to have them," he said.
In the other corner, the O.C. Fair's chief executive officer, Steven Beazley, says negotiations for Cirque's return in 2010 are already underway. He said the fairgrounds has fought off past attempts to woo Cirque to Irvine, by the operators of the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre and the Irvine Spectrum retail-entertainment center. "Each time, they've looked at an alternative venue. What they've told us is that Orange County is one of the highest-capacity stops on their tour, and that's why they love coming back here." And, the fair's boss adds, parking Cirque's big top on the fairgrounds, where it's within view of the Costa Mesa Freeway, has always made for "a very nice marketing tool."
-- Mike Boehm
Photos: A scene (top) from Cirque du Soleil's "Corteo," which played at the Orange County Fairgrounds in 2007. Ken Hively /LAT
Balloon ride (bottom) in Orange County Great Park. Christine Cotter/LAT
