Yoko Ono, George Martin, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at the Las Vegas premiere of Love, the subject of the documentary All Together Now.

Combining the music of the most beloved band in the world with the most visually arresting live performance troupe working today seems like a surefire recipe for a hit. That’s probably what the late George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté thought when they first dreamed up the concept for Love, the Beatles-themed show that premiered in Las Vegas in 2006; and it’s surely what director Adrian Wills imagined when he signed up to make All Together Now, a feature length documentary about the making of the show. You mean I get to use a soundtrack by The Beatles and film talented acrobats performing amid elaborate, colorful stage decorations? Wills must have thought. Where do I sign?

Indeed, All Together Now, which had its U.S. premiere Monday night at the opening ceremony for the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, contains all the same ingredients that has made Love such a big hit despite deep skepticism among Beatles purists. There’s the music, just to start. It may be remixed by original Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his son, Giles Martin, to sound just a little slicker and showier, but it’s still The Beatles, for heaven’s sake. There’s not much you can do to screw up songwriting like that, and the two Martins have taken great care to make sure it still sounds like the music you know and love. Then there’s the genial personalities of the Fab Four themselves — or the remaining two, anyway, plus the widows, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono, as stand-ins for George and John. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr both appear in the film, as they come by to give their blessings through several stages of Love‘s production process, and their entirely familiar yet larger than life presences lend a number of warm fuzzies to the proceedings. Lastly there’s Cirque du Soleil, by now a brand name that’s become synonymous with “wow” — people regularly plop down $130 per ticket for a reason. Cirque may no longer be innovative, but it’s eternally in your face.

So what could go wrong? Quite a lot, it turns out. The set-up Wills provides for the story behind the making of Love starts out as intriguing: what happens when two powerful creative forces come together to collaborate on a $180 million project? Who’s in control? Who gets the final word? And will compromises on both sides render the show a muddled disaster?