What on earth are they going to put on the stage?

The project started with a conversation at a party. Guy Laliberté, the principal founder of Cirque du Soleil, was into George Harrison's music. George was a Cirque du Soleil aficionado. And both were fans of fast, expensive cars and Formula One racing.

Guy Laliberté throws a huge party every year for the Montreal Grand Prix and George had said he might drop by, but wouldn't be able to stay long. He ended up having such a good time, he stayed the night. "George and I talked about bringing our two visions to a new project," Laliberté recalls. "We were convinced that Cirque du Soleil and the Beatles resonate to the same spark of creation, the same threads of poetic inspiration...and we wanted to fuse the two genres."

Writer-Director Dominic Champagne's self-imposed mandate was to create that fusion from a blend of contemporary circus, dance, video, and theatre, and tell the story of the Beatles without once putting a Beatle on stage.

From the outset, Champagne knew he didn't want to portray John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr literally, and he categorically didn't want to use impersonators. Instead, he has approached the content obliquely and presents it in a world of color and fantasy conjured by a cast of characters drawn from the Beatles' songs. That device enabled Champagne to create an entertainment that is more freeform allegory than documentary. But it still lays out the broad lines of the Beatles' individual biographies and their career as a group.

Father McKenzie, Lady Madonna, Eleanor Rigby, Mr. Kite, Julia et al. weave in and out of an elaborately scripted storyline that begins in the ruins of war-ravaged Liverpool before moving on to the mass, pop-phenom hysteria of the 1960s. The narrative continues through the group's psychedelic and spiritual periods to their bitter breakup, and culminates with their eventual reunion in the Cirque du Soleil show.

Putting the pieces of the business puzzle together took years. George Harrison was the prime mover on the Beatles' side of the equation; when he took Paul and Ringo to see "O" at Bellagio, they were quick to see how a partnership with Cirque might work. Yoko Ono, ever the standard-bearer for the late John Lennon, agreed: "The Beatles and Cirque. I think it's a great combination: the Beatles' agile mind and Cirque's agile body."

For the show's producer, Gilles Ste-Croix, LOVE was a labor of...love. Ste-Croix, one of the founders of Cirque du Soleil in 1984, left his home in rural Quebec and wound up as a street entertainer with a stilt-walking act. Along the way, he became a Beatles fan. "Some 20 years ago, in a small cottage on a rainy day, a bunch of friends gathered around an old piano and all afternoon we sang Beatles' songs," he recalls. "Everybody knew the music and the lyrics, and like a nice warm fire, it brought us close together. The Beatles' music ignites love and friendship and will continue to do so for generations of listeners."