One foot across the threshold. Hairs on the back of your neck standing up. It’s dim and familiar. You’ve been places like this. They’re the places that snap you to attention, always glancing over your shoulder. Take a long walk through a back-alley worthy of every seedy movie you ever told your mother you never saw. Lowlife characters in doorways, tattoo parlors, oozing neon and abandoned vehicles, all swallowed in a sea of graffiti. This is the Blackjax and Streetkingz’s world. Settle in. Relax. Take some pics of your new tattoo and send them home to mom.

Come out on the other side of the alley and you’re in the lobby, as cavernous as any massive nightclub and twice as sexy. Did one of the gangs set this place up? Probably. You need somewhere to launder those ill-gotten gains. Doesn’t matter. The drinks are stiff and the night is young. You’ve got a good feeling about this. The music is pumping inside the theatre, the sounds of the DJ pulsing through the walls and rattling the towering graffiti murals. It’s time to go inside.

Sitting in your seat and watching the show is great and all, if that’s what you’re into. Finding yourself in the middle of the show is a damn sight better.

After your journey through the alleyway, you enter the theater, where the 70-foot high, 200-foot long stage doesn’t stop at the footlights or the rafters, but instead just offers a mere suggestion of where the show in front of you might take place. Could be above the stage. Could be in your lap. Please wear nice pants.

The action envelops the audience, with massive end-to-end screens wrapping around the stage. R.U.N is a mixed-media show, and to get there it had to blend pre-recorded content, live projected video, and traditional sets and performance.

“When you walk into our show, it's more dangerous, dramatic,” says Bruce Rodgers, who designed both the show’s set and the lobby. “You're not in a comfort zone. We're the visual opposite of other Cirque du Soleil shows from the get-go. Your emotional anticipation is different. I'm super excited as a set designer amid all those other great set designers that this is the one that's breaking all the rules.”

Tying together the sets and the video is a bold, expressive lighting palate that took its cues from both the heavy metal and electronic soundtrack, but also from the show’s graphic novel aesthetic.

“It's hard to translate a graphic novel into light. It's like taking a chalk line and outlining everything. Manipulating every image to be comic book-ish,” lighting d esigner David Finn said. “We're looking to be really intense. Tyler's music is intense. We're being in-your-face with a lot of stuff.”

Almost two tons of American muscle races through the Nevada Desert, live on stage. Well, the car is live. The desert, not so much. Oh sure, that was the idea at first, but sweeping it back outside every night was getting old, fast.

With content led by Olivier Goulet and Projection Co-designer Johnny Ranger, 4U2C, Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group’s own Creative Design Studio, created a massive video library for the production, including the Mojave during the Rev scene, where the desert slices and twists through the projected landscape behind the on-stage action to create the illusion of movement. It combines into one of the most visceral chapters of R.U.N, a key example of how all the design elements come together to create a world of miles-wide depth and miles-per-hour velocity.

“We wanted to make it more encompassing for the audience,” Goulet said. "All visual elements of the show, including set, lighting and projections are truly working as one. We’re making this experience a visual feast where storyline and performers all come together in context."

And then there’s the Camerawoman. It’s always more fun when someone’s watching, right?

Of the show, but not quite a part of it, The Camerawoman is there to record every knuckle sandwich in loving detail. And she’s tenacious, following the action wherever it leads – down with the fights or up into the rafters -- to bring live video to massive screens that envelop the stage. That footage is textured live, and often split up into panels… there’s that graphic novel feel again. Live video, action movie, graphic novel, show…it’s all there, at the same time.

If you’re not living dangerously, are you even alive?

Yes, and typically, for much longer. But still.

R.U.N is a stunt show at the heart of it, which might mean starting from zero considering how other productions are steeped so heavily in acrobatics. For performance coordinator Rob Bollinger, though, it was a homecoming. Bollinger started his career in stunt work and brought that experience to bear on creating R.U.N’s kinetic action and frenetic pace.

It started with the story, where Bollinger drew on the gritty, industrial tableau to create a blend of fighting styles among the Streetkingz and Blackjax. You might see some mixed martial arts, wushu or straight-up pro-wrestling action during the show’s multiple street fights. And it’s not just fighting. R.U.N’s stunt performers also do high falls, aerial work and body burns, while dodging pyrotechnics, flames and explosions. All in a day’s work, right?

R.U.N’s blend of live video and live action forced the stunts to be tighter than they’d be in a movie, where the camera couldn’t always hide the tricks. If it looked good on film, it still had to look good to members of the audience at any spot in the theater – and be forgiving enough on performers that they could repeat it 10 times a week.

“I want it to be a real stunt show, for you to feel the impact, feel the gravity, feel all the elements that we have when you're doing a real stunt show,” Bollinger said. “And then understanding that film is just one or two takes, but here it's ‘I have to do it eight more times a week.’ How can we make it doable and repeatable, yet still be wowed? I think certain stunts have an acrobatic nature to them, so we're not completely departing from what we know and what we do, but it's certainly in a different context.”

Desperado. Planet Terror. Sin City. If you’re putting together a gritty neo-noir action thriller, you should get the best. And Robert Rodriguez is the best. Since exploding onto the freewheeling 1990s indie movie scene with El Mariachi, Rodriguez has written and directed over a dozen features, but he’s never before tackled a live production show. That changed with R.U.N.

“It's very different writing for the stage; there's lots of things to consider,” he said. “You can't have traditional dialogue, so we're using a voice-over device. But even with that, a lot has to be conveyed, and so you have to set up situations and offer story in paced-out doses. The rest has to be conveyed through movement and staging. I knew it would be a great opportunity to see behind the curtain on all that it entails to put a big show together, in all areas including on a production level.”

Rodriguez’s hard-boiled dialogue drives the voice-over, and in turn the story of R.U.N., drawing the audience into this seamy underworld full of high-stakes action, set in a dusty desert landscape. Which should sound familiar to Rodriguez fans. Those desert showdowns, he says, heighten the sense of infinite possibilities – a Wild West where anything can happen. It’s that kind of anything-goes atmosphere that allows Rodriguez the latitude to find the narrative between these kinetic stunt pieces. Which was a unique challenge in scripting a show like R.U.N.

“I love working within parameters,” he said. “I find it just as creative if not more creative then when you are totally free. There was already a rough story in place and all of the set pieces when I got contacted. They were looking for a story thread that could tie it all together. Which is really fun to try and reverse engineer a story by doing a minimal of moving things around. I felt it would be more genre specific to have several story twists, so the characters evolved in order to accommodate that, without really changing the structure or set pieces.”