YMMV / Alegría

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The film adaptation — the story is the sort commonly seen as too dark and mature for children, but good luck trying to get older viewers to watch an allegory in which whimsical circus people are the good guys.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's hard to tell with the makeup, but the "baby" clown is played by Whoopi Goldberg. (She was in a relationship with Frank Langella when the film was being shot, and wanted to participate in some way.) Goldberg currently performs stand-up comedy in Las Vegas several times a year in the theatre at Treasure Island on Friday nights, when its usual tenant — Cirque's Mystère — takes one of its regularly scheduled nights off!
• Lowest Common Denominator: The original esoteric representation of power, through symbolic gestures such as the possession of the white letter, have been dumbed down to appeal to a wider audience.
• Signature Song: The title tune, which serves as the finale, has become this for Cirque du Soleil as a whole and turned up elsewhere in a variety of ways:
  • It was featured in Midnight Sun, the company's 20th anniversary concert.
  • In Delirium' a rewritten, up-tempo version ("Novo Alegria") served as the finale.
  • The movie's soundtrack album included a gentler, acoustic version of the song; this appeared on the company's Greatest Hits album 25 (2009).
  • "heatre/Alegria" is the only Cirque song to appear in some form on each of the first three of their Greatest Hits Album compilations.
• Values Dissonance: Mystere was embraced by Las Vegas audiences, so Steve Wynn figured that this show would have a similarly warm reception in Biloxi, the gambling mecca of the Southern United States. As detailed in the book Winner Takes All, Wynn didn't bother looking into the tastes of gamblers in the South — among other things they apparently weren't interested in seeing a show as part of a casino resort stay. Beau Rivage was an expensive dud for its first few years, and it got so bad that a deal offering a two-night stay at the resort for $69 threw in tickets to this show for just $10 more per person. The custom theater built for the show was subsequently gutted and remodeled into an all-purpose space for touring acts.

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