A sneak peek at Life Is Beautiful’s Troubadour Stage — PHOTOS

It's 3:30 p.m. on a scorching Thursday in downtown Las Vegas. While things are beginning to settle down and leaves are starting to change in other parts of the country, the entertainment capital of the world — or at least this section of it in East Fremont is bustling with a flurry of activity as construction crews work furiously to get everything prepared for Friday's opening of this year's Life Is Beautiful festival.

We've been given the chance to take a sneak peek of the Troubadour Stage, which is being presented by Insomniac, the folks responsible for putting together Electric Daisy Carnival, the annual three-day electronic music festival at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Our tour guide on this sweltering afternoon is a Insomniac's production director, Alyxzander Bear — or just Bear for short, apparently, which is fitting. While Bear is his actual surname, it's also a apt description of the imposing man, who looks a bit like Grizzly Adams and who started his career as a bodyguard, looking after the well-being of various celebrities more than two decades ago, before signing on with Insomniac to spearhead all of its production.

Before Bear takes us over to the Troubadour Stage, which is actually within walking distance of where we meet him on the corner of 7th and Fremont, he graciously wheels us around the festival grounds on a golf cart, giving us a sneak peek of this year's offerings. First we make a stop at the Main Stage, then we pop by the Art Motel, where a collection of artists are busily making last-minute adjustments to their installations, and then we stop briefly by the Boombox artcar, before proceeding to our final destination.

A few rights and lefts later, we pull up to the Troubadour Stage, which is sandwiched in the parking lot between Container Park and the Western Hotel. At first sight, it calls to mind Circuit Grounds, one of the secondary stages at this year's EDC. For good reason, it turns out; the Troubadour Stage is built with the same materials.

For visual purposes, for those who didn't attend the dance festival this summer or haven't seen photos, picture a colossal-sized airplane hangar 190 feet wide by 240 feet long and 100 feet tall, outfitted with a mass of state-of-the-art video panels. The Troubadour Stage is like that, only smaller.

At almost half the size, the Troubadour is Circuit Grounds' little brother at 120 feet wide and 240 feet long — diminutive by EDC standards. But it's still considerable, as Insomniac founder Pasquale Rotella points out. "This is a smaller version," he says, "but it's still impressive and expansive."

Bear says the Troubadour Stage took 64 guys slightly less than two days to construct it. By contrast, Circuit Grounds took three weeks to build and almost a week to disassemble. "It's like a giant erector set," Bear says, noting how he and his team put this particular structure together in segments, staggering the sections so everybody wasn't running into one another.

"I've got an interesting photo of 10 boom lifts, 60-foot boom lifts, in here, working all at the same time, and it looks just like this mass of boom lifts going everywhere," Bear says. "But they all know exactly what they're supposed to do, and we had no incidents. The reason I wanted to push it on the (load)-in is because I know we're going to be under pressure on the (load)-out."

Just slightly. Bear says he'll need all 120 hands on deck to tear it all down. The clock starts ticking as soon as the festival ends. When the final notes of Knife Party's set ring out Sunday just before midnight, Bear and his crew will have just 14 hours to disassemble everything and haul it out, leaving the parking lot the same way they found it on Tuesday.

What makes the addition of this stage even more noteworthy is that this may just end up being where the vibe of the original Circuit Grounds lives from now on, as its future at EDC isn't etched in stone at this point.

"I don't know that I'm going to be bringing back the megastructure for next year's EDC," Rotella reveals. "I haven't made a decision yet. Just because I thought it was a little cramped in there at times, and I might want to open it up. So I thought that maybe that experience could grow with Life Is Beautiful."

That experience will not include fire, not this year, anyway, Bear confirms. "Because it's technically an indoor structure, we could do some pyro, but we don't … especially in a new city, this is a new fire department for us, and we don't want to push it. It's going to be impressive enough as it is."

Indeed. For the inaugural run, you can expect plenty of eye-grabbing projected on some 827 video tiles and 30 LED spheres placed strategically overhead throughout the venue, along with lighting from 50 strobes, 10 lasers, augmented by eight C02 jets, four confetti cannons and four streamer cannons.

While likening the Troubadour Stage to Circuit Grounds makes sense to provide a visual point of reference, rest assured this is a completely different structure. "The design's different," Bear notes. "The only thing that's the same is the structure. The lighting, design and where the visuals, the LEDs and lasers are is all different."

"The creative guys got together and we figured out how big our footprint was," Bear says, explaining how this year's production came together, "what we could fit in here, and then we got to work on what we could put into it, as far as the moving lights, the video panels, the special effects, the lasers and whatnot."

To the Insomniac crew members, who all seem to subscribe to Rotella's vision, as evidenced by the production values at EDC every year, presentation is everything. The team, according to Bear, is constantly brainstorming, trying to think of ways it can outdo what it did previously. "We don't ever talk about peaking," he says.

Not surprisingly, that same sort of drive carries over into Insomniac's involvement in Life Is Beautiful, which Rotella says he signed on for because he believes in the fest, the people organizing the event and he wants to make a difference in this his adopted hometown, to give back to the music community here that's supported him and his vision with his annual festival.

"That's where I'm raising my family, and I want to do more in the city that I live, because it has been a city that has supported one of my biggest brands, and I'm grateful for that," Rotella says. "I love Vegas so much that I ended up moving here, and I want to do more.

"You know, I've been talking about doing another festival for a long time. It's been difficult because we have so many festivals around the world these days. This has already been going on, and I love the guys that have been behind it. They're friends of mine, and they're good people. When they invited me to get involved, I jumped at the opportunity for those reasons — them being good people, it being in Vegas, and then also, it's a very different festival.

"We have one other festival that is kind of multi-genre, that's outside of dance music, and that excites us because I wanted to expand our portfolio. You know, I love music, and I love festivals — and it's not limited to dance music. So that was another big reason why I was really excited about getting involved."

With the input of the night owls, the appeal of Life Is Beautiful is obviously more expansive — not to mention reflective of another side of Vegas music culture. "They haven't had a lot of dance music. They've had some in the past, and we wanted to bring more dance music to the table," Rotella says. "We also wanted to bring our marketing to the table and try to get a crowd that hasn't been there before to check it out. And, you know, they have been wanting to grow the festival, and we wanted to help make that happen.

"Also, we wanted to add to the art. We're going to have some walkabout performers, which is some stuff you've never seen at Life Is Beautiful before. We have a troupe called the Dragon Knights that is coming. They have the most amazing costumes that I believe are out there, and they walk around entertaining people. So just little stuff that you'll see from Insomniac that we're bringing into the Life Is Beautiful experience, so it has a little bit of our flavor in it."

A little flavor makes for a lot of work for guys like Bear, but he doesn't mind it, not one bit. In fact, he loves what he does, so much so, as the old aphorism goes, it doesn't feel so much like work when he's leading the Insomniac crew. "Like I said, this is the most fun decade I've ever had in my life," declares the 64-year-old production manager, who's been working with Rotella for half of his 20-year career. "I can't think of doing anything else better than this.

"I can't retire yet," Bear concludes. "I'll last as long as Pasquale does."

Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com.