Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based show business juggernaut that once appeared headed for nothing but fame, fortune and world-wide acclaim, has been reduced to a skeleton crew charged with keeping the company breathing.
On Tuesday, it announced it was laying off 2,600 employees — 1,200 artists and 1,400 technicians.
For two days, the roughly 1,600 employees working at the company’s Montreal head office remained on the job.
The axe fell on them Thursday.
About 95 per cent of the 4,679-member workforce is now looking for work.
Cirque du Soleil shows around the world are now grounded.(Jonathan Short/Associated Press)
Cirque du Soleil President Daniel Lamarre said the layoffs, which he called temporary, were necessary to stabilize the company’s future in light of current measures being taken around the world to fight the spread of COVID-19.
Limiting the size of public gatherings, he said, had forced Cirque du Soleil to cancel shows world-wide.
On Wednesday, Moody’s, the influential American bond credit rating company, downgraded Cirque du Soleil’s rating, to “negative.”
In an interview with the Montreal Gazette’s Brendan Kelly, Lamarre rejected arguments that the company was already precariously overextended financially prior to the COVID-19 crisis.
“We were in a growing mode, and under normal circumstances my view is that probably in six months to a year from now we would have been worth more than (what the Cirque was worth when Guy Laliberté sold the company for $1.5 billion in 2015),” Lamarre told Kelly.
“We were optimizing our portfolio of shows. We had a huge axis of development. … Nobody could predict what is happening now.”
With files from CBC (John MacFarlane), Montreal Gazette (Brendan Kelly), Canadian Press
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