Less than six weeks after opening in New York, 'Banana Shpeel' -- the latest high-budget, high-profile show from Cirque du Soleil -- is scheduled to close Sunday. For Cirque, the show was supposed to be another milestone: a production that could compete artistically and commercially with Broadway, blending signature Cirque acrobatics and clowns with elements of vaudeville, dance and musical theater. Instead 'Banana Shpeel' will go down as one of the most frustrating failures in Cirque's history. With an original budget of $20 million, the production not only had the Cirque touch but also a team led by David Shiner, the renowned clown and co-creator of the hit 1993 Broadway show 'Fool Moon,' as writer and director. And the show was booked for the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, which had reopened in 2009 after a $16 million restoration. Now the closing notice stands as the first time that Cirque has quickly shuttered a major show, said Daniel Lamarre, the company's president and chief executive. And the experience has clearly had an effect: Lemarre said it was too early to say if Cirque would try a theatrically driven entertainment like 'Banana Shpeel' again. 'We tried something very new and very different for Cirque, which is what we love doing -- tackling new creative challenges -- but obviously this was a difficult and somewhat surprising process for us,' Lamarre said in a telephone interview from the company's headquarters in Montreal. 'I think it will take some time to understand what happened with 'Banana Shpeel' in New York.' According to interviews with nine executives and artists who worked on 'Banana Shpeel,' the production appeared to suffer from competing creative impulses. Cirque is known for using a highly improvisational, free-form process to create shows, preferring to experiment with clown or circus acts rather than to work with a script. In the case of 'Banana Shpeel,' however, the plan was to use a conventional plot, with music and dancing, as well as actual characters, like an overbearing, off-color theater impresario named Marty Schmelky, and an array of clowns and actors who spar with him. Yet for long stretches of development in 2009, Shiner and his team were still not working with a scripted story; instead, artists involved with the production said, Cirque emphasized the importance of working with a blank canvas and creating vaudeville numbers with bits of story interspersed. (Several attempts through intermediaries to reach Shiner, who lives in Germany, were unsuccessful over the last week.) 'There was such a struggle getting everyone, people in the rehearsal room, senior Cirque executives, on the same page about what the show was supposed to be,' said Annaleigh Ashford, a Broadway actress ('Hair,' 'Legally Blonde') who was hired in late 2008 to play the main female role in the show. 'But I got the clear sense that Cirque, while wanting a different sort of show, also didn't want a show that looked too much like Broadway.' Lamarre said Cirque wanted to avoid putting labels like 'Broadway and musical theater' on 'Banana Shpeel,' so as not to predetermine the shape of the show or the expectations of audience members. Still, he added, 'When you're working on a show that you're hoping will be different from other productions out there, you can run into problems as people try to determine what the show is.' Within Cirque, meanwhile, the problem of determining what 'Banana Shpeel' would be came to a head last fall, when Shiner and his cast and team held a closed-door performance of their work for senior Cirque executives, including Guy Laliberte, who created Cirque in 1984 and built it into a global brand with total revenues of more than $700 million a year. By all accounts, the performance was poorly received. The show struck executives as a little of everything (vaudeville, theater, clowning, acrobatics) but neither entrancing nor memorable by the standards of Cirque -- whose popular shows include 'Ka' (a gravity-defying production, inspired by martial arts performers) and 'O' (a water show). It was also a nerve-racking performance, according to several people involved, since a pre-New York run of 'Banana Shpeel' was soon to open in Chicago. Shortly afterward Ashford and another actor hired for his theater experience, Michael Longoria ('Jersey Boys'), were let go from the production. (The show's composer, Laurence O'Keefe, who was a co-writer of the music and lyrics for 'Legally Blonde,' had already quit the show last June because of concerns about the competing, conflicting visions for the production, he said.) Shiner and his team quickly and heavily reworked the show, focusing on Schmelky, his troupe of clowns and the vaudeville acts rather than the more traditional musical numbers. But it was all to disappointing ends. In December 'Banana Shpeel' opened in Chicago to disastrous reviews, and Cirque executives declared that the show was not even close to ready for New York. 'A lot of people have told me that a normal producer would have given up after Chicago, but we're not a normal producer,' Lamarre said. 'That said, we don't think we're invincible, we weren't arrogant about it. We weren't pleased after Chicago. But the spirit of Cirque, working day and night to make the show work, is a point of pride for us, and we wanted to give our team a chance to fix the show.' The Beacon in Manhattan, meanwhile, passed up bookings for three months awaiting 'Banana Shpeel' preview performances, which ended up being delayed three times, from early February to, ultimately, April 29. With continued reworking of the show, the production budget ballooned to at least $25 million from $20 million, Lamarre said. More people began weighing in with proposed changes, including executives at MSG Entertainment, which owns the Beacon Theater and is a partner in 'Banana Shpeel' and other Cirque productions. (The Cirque show 'Wintuk' has become a Christmastime staple at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden.) The Cirque team had sole artistic control over 'Banana Shpeel,' but the MSG Entertainment team had a financial stake in the show, as well as in the decision to turn over the Beacon Theater to Cirque, which meant ousting its popular March residency by the Allman Brothers. Once 'Banana Shpeel' finally began its run in New York, opening on May 19 and accompanied by heavy television advertising, weekly ticket sales were only a fraction of Cirque's projections. And almost four weeks after opening, Cirque officials announced they would close the show. Paul Binder, the founding artistic director of Big Apple Circus, with which Cirque has been competing in New York City in recent years, was invited to a dress rehearsal of 'Banana Shpeel' and also attended opening night. While he said he admired much of the talent in the show, he added that he sensed right away that Cirque might have a problem building an audience. 'The reality is, people have very specific expectations with Cirque shows, and 'Banana Shpeel' turned out to be neither fish nor fowl -- neither circus act nor theatrical vaudeville entertainment,' Binder said. 'So I think it was probably difficult to get a large audience excited about a show when many didn't really understand what it was.' The final decision to close was Cirque's, Lamarre said, adding that the company never came under pressure from MSG Entertainment to leave the Beacon so it could book more profitable acts. For his part, Jay Marciano, president of MSG Entertainment, said in a statement that regardless of the 'Banana Shpeel' debacle, his company would continue its 'long-standing relationship' with Cirque, including on a major Cirque production scheduled for Radio City Music Hall in 2011. While Lamarre said Cirque was 'very excited' about that Radio City show, details of which remain secret, he added that executives were not casually moving on from 'Banana Shpeel.' The show is expected eventually to have a run in Toronto, where, Lamarre said, Cirque was hopeful that the show would finally find an audience. 