Still, Angel's uneasy peace with the media is a featured component of "Believe." There's a sequence involving a horde of paparazzi that surrounds Angel, invasively photographing him until he busts out some magic to clear the scene. "That's a moment where we try to talk about his life," said Denoncourt. "It's a dreamy, nightmare kind of thing."
Criss Angel: Believe quoting audience members who had flown in from as far away as London to see a preview. performance of "Believe." "The verdict by many?" Elfman wrote. "Creatively, 'Believe' is a possibly unsalvageable 'waste of time' and a 'dead end' that literally bored some audience members to sleep."
Even before the early negative fan commentary
A magician with ambition
"CRISS ANGEL: Believe" is the crystallization of two long-held dreams. In 1993, the guy on the marquee was basically nobody, a wannabe rock star-cum-magician named Christopher Sarantakos. Living with his parents, performing a hybrid rock-magic act at children's birthday parties and corporate events, the future Criss Angel began collating his ideas about a show featuring magic as something other than "hokey novelty about shoving girls in boxes" and maneuvered to "catapult it into the 21st century so that magic garners the same respect as cinema and music."
Long on ambition and short on cash, he began building mock-ups for his future illusions out of cardboard, duct tape and plastic bags. In 2001, Angel finally hit it big with his hit off-Broadway show "Mindfreak," a professional Hail Mary his mother mortgaged the family home to pay for. Around the same time, Cirque du Soleil's founder, Guy Laliberte, decided to branch the French-Canadian performance troupe out from its core identity as a circus to encompass magic.
"It's been a dream of Guy to do a magic show for the last 20 years," said Denoncourt, co-writer and director of "Believe," a veteran of more than 80 productions in his native Quebec, including classics by Chekhov, Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht.
"We had tried in '96 to build a magic show in Montreal," Ste-Croix pointed out. "We had a magician from France -- I can't remember his name. His tricks were good. But it's not only about tricks. Magic has to be carried by someone you can believe has the power to do these incredible things. Criss Angel is a character that can carry a show."
Backstage after the debut "Believe" performance, Denoncourt took issue with Ste-Croix, heaping credit on Angel for concocting the show's overall narrative premise, characters and illusions.
