Cirque du Soleil will be laying off 400 people beginning at the end of January, mostly at its Montreal headquarters, the troupe has announced.
The move was attributed to high production costs for the troupe’s dizzyingly complex shows, which can run as high as $25 million. The troupe also announced that it would be closing 4 of the 19 shows currently running around the world.
“We would have been much happier to tell you those shows weren’t closing,†the group’s spokeswoman, Renée-Claude Ménard, told The Globe and Mail. “But it’s not a revenue issue, it’s an expense issue.â€
Cirque du Soleil, founded in the early 1980s by Guy Laliberte and fellow sreet performers, has annual global revenues of nearly $1 billion and employs some 5,000 people, including 2,000 in Montreal. The strength of the Canadian dollar, Ms. Menard said, has been a problem for the company, which incurs 95 percent of its expenses in Canada but gets 95 percent of its revenues elsewhere, notably in the United States, where several shows are in residence at Las Vegas casinos. A show based on the music of Michael Jackson and based on the touring show “Immortal†(currently on view in Kazan, Russia) is set to open in a specially renovated theater at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas in the spring.
