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“‘” by , is coming to Fox Theater on Dec. 20-31, 2024, marking the entertainment company’s first holiday-centered show.

James Hadley, the stage director for the production, has had experience with creating and directing large-scale events, contemporary circus productions, and professional theater productions for over 25 years. Hadley’s work on the holiday show started in 2019.

“We started working on the show back in 2019 and we were really just doing a one off Christmas show,” Hadley said. “We had a lot of fun putting it together, and now we have four productions that are touring all across North America.”

The idea for the show came from Diane Quinn, the chief creative officer at Cirque du Soleil at the time.

“We were talking about a Christmas show, and what we were going to do,” Hadley said. “I think audiences already have a pretty fantastic choice of Christmas shows to go to, with “The Nutcracker” and “A Christmas Carol,” so we wanted to do something a little bit different.”

While there are many Christmas stories to choose from, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” was chosen by the creative team because of how influential the story is to the modern depictions of Santa Claus.

“We just kept coming back to this poem, “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and I think so many of us have it as part of our tradition, either having it read to us as kids, or reading it to our kids,” Hadley said. “There’s so much in this poem that now influences how we see Christmas, how we see Santa Claus, the eight reindeer, their names, that they pull Santa’s sleigh. All of it comes from this poem, and so we really use that as our touchstone to create this show.”

Hadley ensures that this holiday show is unlike the Cirque du Soleil shows that came before, offering the clear storytelling and characters that showgoers would expect in a theatrical event.

“I want to make sure that we were telling a very clear story, which is a little bit different for Cirque since it is often very image-based,” Hadley said. “Since we wanted it to be a theatrical event, I wanted people to have a story that they can follow and a character that they can root for, so that was different for all of us.”

While the show is different from other Cirque du Soleil productions, the performers aim to keep the audience at the edge of their seat with a variety of difficult acrobatic tricks.

“There’s definitely a really emotional moment in the show, where there is a hair suspension act that we do,” Hadley said. “Literally, the young lady is flying, just being held up by her hair. What that does for her is it frees up her whole body, so it becomes this beautiful and lyrical choreography.”

With such a mix of theatrical storytelling and Cirque du Soleil flare, “‘Twas the Night Before…” offers a new experience for Cirque fans and newcomers alike.

“If you’ve seen a Cirque show before, there’s something new for people to come and see,” Hadley said. “There’s a lot of choreography, and a lot of really different elements there. And if you’ve never seen a Cirque show, I think it’s a great introduction to the circular universe.”

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