In conjunction with this year’s 10th anniversary of the Cirque du Soleil Beatles show Love in Las Vegas, the Beatles’ Apple Corps and Cirque du Soleil have crafted a music video for the show’s rearrangement of George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
The video, directed by Dandypunk, Andre Kasten and Leah Moyer, focuses on a Cirque dancer interacting with animated images. The visuals morph from a human form to undulating strings that reflect and complement the dancer’s fluid body language.
Harrison’s song is an alternate take of the familiar track from the 1968 double album The Beatles, a.k.a. The White Album. The electric guitar, bass and drums on the better-known version are stripped away. Accompaniment here is instead provided by fingerpicked acoustic guitar and strings in an orchestration by longtime Beatles producer George Martin, who created the show’s mash-up soundtrack in collaboration with his son, Giles Martin.
“This is the last music I will ever write for the Beatles,” George Martin said around the time the Love show opened in June 2006. He died in March at 90, and the new video is described as a tribute to him.
The show originally was expected to have a 10-year run at the Mirage Hotel & Casino. That run has been extended and the show has been revamped using technology that did not exist when it opened.
Nearly 8 million people have attended more than 4,500 performances of Love during the last 10 years.
The show grew out of the wish expressed by Harrison near the end of his life to find one more creative project for the surviving members of the group to collaborate on.
A 10th-anniversary celebration will take place on July 14 and Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, are expected to attend.
Meanwhile, Apple Corps and Universal Music Enterprises, which now administers the Beatles’ recording catalogue, announced that the Fab Four’s music has logged more than 1 billion streams in the six months since that catalogue was made available in December on Spotify and other streaming services worldwide.
