Voila!

By RICHARD CORLISS

A beautiful young man sails over the green earth, briefly alighting, then aloft again. Next a man and a woman materialize, Adam and Eve without the ! snake, in a stately, rapturous dance that hints at what passion was like before guilt. Finally, six animal-angels drop from the sky and soar back into it, gliding, pirouetting, seeming to meditate in midair before they swoop back, swing down and holds hands, in a little aero-dynamic miracle of celestial accord.

The creatures are only human, of course -- just acrobats, dancers, trapeze artists, doing their lithe, aerodynamic thing, proving that bodies can be pliable sculptures and that gravity is just another rule to be broken. The show is Mystere, one of two new extravaganzas from the Montreal-based troupe Cirque du Soleil. And the scene is, of all places, the Treasure Island hotel in Las Vegas, temple of the great American crapshoot.

But when Cirque comes to town, all entertainment bets are off. In four acclaimed tours of North America, the company has reinvented the traditional circus, updating it with a story line and baroque costumes while returning it to its origins as a home for spellbinders and spellbreakers. Mystere is as posh as any Vegas spectacular: 72 performers, including scantily clad high steppers of the show-girl persuasion and a huge stage full of gaudy illusion. This isn't Siegfried and Roy; it's Siegfried-times-Roy. Yet Mystere has the old Cirque majesty, the theatrical buoyancy, plus a more surreal appeal of its own. If someone were to dream of a cathedral to the goddesses of earth and rebirth, and then dare to build it on the Vegas strip, this would be it.

Mystere is just one of three Cirque shows on view this season. Saltimbanco, which wowed Americans on both coasts in 1992-93, opens Nov. 2 in Montreal, after a six-month Tokyo engagement. And Alegria, the troupe's newest touring show, opens next week on the Santa Monica Pier, a few miles from Los Angeles; in 1995 it will play New York City and other Easterly venues. In all these towns Cirque du Soleil will be a hot ticket, and a fairly pricey one ($39.50 for Alegria's best seat, $52 for Mystere's). As the shows proliferate, as casino owners and movie moguls compete to showcase Cirque, the artists who founded the company and still run it have to decide how quickly and broadly they want to expand. Metaphorically speaking, Cirque Ltd. is poised to become Cirque Inc.

In just 10 years the outfit has expanded from a band of Montreal street performers to a $40 million-a-year corporation. Cirque's first U.S. show cost about $200,000; Alegria cost $3 million; Mystere, $7 million. Since the beginning of last year, the number of employees has doubled, but hardly fast enough to accommodate the artistic and entrepreneurial itch of the creators, who have devised and fulfilled two five-year plans, and are launched on a third. They are building a $10 million "creation studio," an elaborate rehearsal space, in Montreal. Now a television series is planned. Perhaps there will be another permanent site, in Vancouver -- if Steve Wynn, the Treasure Island owner who put up $26 million for a theater designed to Cirque's specifications, gets approval from Canadian officials to build a casino there. Next year Saltimbanco invades Europe.

All this costs money. "I'm astonished at the change," says Gilles Ste- Croix, 45, Cirque's artistic director. "I can have an idea, and when it's evaluated, I can't believe how expensive it is. Every idea we had for Mystere seemed to cost more than $100,000. And I'd say, 'We built a show for that much in '84!' But we spend the money because we want to keep the show of the highest quality. It is the point of the arrow of what we do."

Cirque's triumph is that it has kept to the point, to its earliest mission of blending circus with theater. And if the meta-Broadway superproduction Mystere is the most theatrical of Cirque shows so far, Alegria is the most circusy, the most intimate, traditional, European. Though it boasts wondrous sets and costumes -- an aviary motif with acrobat birds in brilliant plumage -- it is dominated by the clowns, most of them Russian, with a dolorous wit and poignant stories to tell. In one sketch a clown-bird perches alone on a telegraph wire (a rope stretched across the stage) enjoying his solitude until another arrives; it is a French existential drama in miniature, a No Exit or Godot with a sweeter aftertaste.

Alegria is full of these delicate moments, laced with wonder. The "fast- track" act -- 14 acrobats racing and bouncing on trampoline strips embedded in the stage -- allows for both solo dazzledry and daredevil group synchronization; it's like a playground of gifted children who actually get along. So do the girl duos of tightrope artists (Chinese) and contortionists (Mongolian). And everywhere are the stately clowns, peering through their gilded, glassless mirrors at the enraptured audience.

If amazement can escalate into astonishment, that is the difference between Alegria and Mystere. From the black baby carriages at the beginning to the giant lumbering snail at the climax, director Franco Dragone peoples the stage with outlandish figures from a Bosch or Robert Wilson dreamscape. They have sad eyes or pinheads or faces on the backs of their heads, or they wander about pensively on stilt legs, passersby in the parade of life. They somnambulate while the acrobats somersault on a trampoline bent up at the ends, as others jump from one vertical pole to another using only leg power -- and that gorgeous bungee ballet of angels unfolds to Rene Dupere's ethereal music. For this powerful, beautifully designed fantasy, applause is unworthy. Awe will do.

Ste-Croix doesn't want audiences to be so awed by the Cirque experience that it becomes mere spectacle. "We always keep contact with the public," he says. "This is our source. We want the public to cross through the wall and be an actor in the event. It makes us feel as if we are not God; we're human, we are Saltimbanco -- a street player, here tonight to share this big joke, our show."

But as these shows get bigger, so do the challenges. The Cirque bosses need to be pleased; the powerful men they deal with need to be attended, though not appeased. Ste-Croix says that when Wynn saw a run-through of Mystere, he didn't like it: "He thought it was too heavy, like an opera." Ste-Croix assured his sponsor that the piece was still in rehearsal but that Cirque would not dilute its brand of theater to turn Mystere into a standard Vegas show. The company is equally unlikely to compromise on movie offers. Disney and Universal (two film companies with theme-park operations that might welcome a Cirque attraction) have expressed interest, but Ste-Croix insists that Cirque have artistic control, which he doubts any big studio will agree to.

Meanwhile, the gifted vagabonds from the streets of Montreal have established a globe-trotting itinerary for each new tent show, which they continue to produce biennially: the first year in Canada and California; second year, the East Coast and Chicago; third year, Japan and Asia; fourth and fifth years, Europe.

"Our latest five-year plan will bring us into the year 2000, and then," Ste-Croix says with a chuckle, "we'll go to Mars!" But why reach for the heavens? As an enchanting theatrical experience -- as a place where audiences can watch a Prometheus glide magically in space and then find themselves soaring with him -- this Circus of the Sun already rules the earth.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York