An audience in-the-round gets pulled into the Beatles' psychedelic era in "Love." Many seats end up under fabric that becomes a canvas for projected visuals. Photos by Jeff Scheid. Cirque du Soleil's familiar aerial acrobatics are mixed with the Beatles-era symbology of umbrellas, a Nurse (Ekaterina Arnaoutova) and Her Majesty (Craig Berman, left).

"Now, you did understand the exploding Volkswagen symbolizes the band breaking up?" Gilles Ste-Croix asks after Tuesday's performance of the new Beatles-themed opus "Love."

Uhm, well, sure. Of course.

Truth be told, I had still been chewing on other aspects of the climactic number, "A Day in the Life."

The epic song is a must for any stage spectacle based on the music of the Beatles. The big question was how it would be used. Cirque du Soleil's answer is one even John Lennon might not have consciously connected when he wrote the lyrics after the auto-accident death of a friend, Tara Browne.

Thanks again to earlier clues from Ste-Croix, the show's "director of creation," I was reminded Lennon's mother died when she was struck by a car when he was 17. The early loss of both their mothers was a strong bond between Lennon and Paul McCartney.

So the wistful, dreamlike mother figure (Alevtyna Titarenko) becomes a recurring image in "Love." During "A Day in the Life," she floats down to a little boy in a bed and gently tucks him in, then is pulled away from him as a threatening circle of headlights closes in. When she later faces the Volkswagen that spectacularly flies into several pieces, I was content to call it the triumph of the boy's heart over the realities of life.

But the Volkswagen comes straight from the "Abbey Road" cover, complete with the correct license plate, "281F." The Beetle pops up throughout the show, reinforcing Ste-Croix's explanation.

You can see by now that "Love" aspires to be more than just spectacular eye candy. The blessing and the curse is spectacle may be all many ticket buyers expect, and all that they will receive. Like "Ka" before it, Cirque's attempts to turn the corner into more substantial theater may be lost to those who can't tug the shirtsleeve of a director to explain things after the show.

Unlike "Ka," however, "Love" caters to short attention spans, almost to a fault. Original Beatles fans now in their 50s may be numbed by the rat-a-tat approach aimed more at the post-MTV generation. Rumor has it that McCartney's response to a preview he caught on June 15 was asking director Dominic Champagne to slow it down in places.

"Love" suggests Cirque is still a company in transition. It has some of the troupe's finest work and some of its weakest -- such as a comic treatment of "Blackbird" that goes on way too long -- all rolled into the same 90 minutes.

For the most part, the Beatles theme and booming soundtrack by George Martin and his son Giles help "Love" fight an overfamiliarity with Cirque on the Strip. New patrons drawn by the Beatles angle may not realize the wide-eyed everyman character (Goos Meeuwsen) wandering into a Fellini-esque world is a Cirque idea that goes all the way back to its first Las Vegas big-top production, "Nouvelle Experience." This time, the big-top strains are "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite."

And we have seen a variation of the grounded fireman (Valeriy Kharun) yearning for the airborne "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" (Evelyne Lamontagne) in "Zumanity." But here you know the song.

Those who expected merely a series of acrobatic performances set to the classic hits might be surprised at how few times the show actually halts for stunt work. The quartet of roller-skaters vaulting steep, 12-foot ramps to "Help" are the exception, not the rule.

Director Champagne tries to go deeper, to draw a biography of the Beatles from the characters created by their song lyrics, from post-war Britain through the end of the hippie era (and so, too, the band).

It's an ambitious agenda, declared at the beginning when a capella vocals on "Because" explode into "Get Back." The characters are introduced on a rooftop set suggestive of the "Let It Be" concert, which collapses into debris to the sounds of World War II bombing. The end is the beginning.

The quirky characters who wander in and out of most Cirque shows become the literal likes of Sergeant Pepper (Rodrique Proteau), Eleanor Rigby (Silvia Fontoura Aderne) and Father McKenzie (Eugene Brim). The Beatles themselves (portrayed by actors) drift in and out in silhouette on giant screens that surround the theater in-the-round or on scrims that descend upon the two playing areas.

The Fab Four also provide abstract narrative, thanks to outtakes of studio chatter or lead-ins to live radio performances.

Some sequences -- such as the manic trampoline antics in "Revolution"-- are simplistically literal, for Cirque at least. The company's more oblique, evocative beauty is captured by a solo dancer (Charlotte O'Dowd) floating amid falling sheets of paper in "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Is she a young Eleanor Rigby? Or whoever the ill-fated guy who "blew his mind out in a car" left behind to mourn?

You'd have to ask a director. Or, more practically, see the show again.

I'm sure Cirque might have had this in mind, and "Love" is sure to be here a long time to give you the chance.