Rock ‘n’ roll, motorcycles, race cars and industrial landscapes in the seedy underbelly of a sketchy city. If they’re right about “dress for the job you want,” then this whole crew is ready to print up new business cards for the reckless, unhinged street thug industry. R.U.N is a world of gangland mayhem in a Las Vegas not entirely unlike our own. And if you’ve spent any time in the real Las Vegas lately, you might have noticed one or two people who stood out. Way out. Those people are the inspiration for these characters. After all, that’s the world they inhabit – they’re children of the night, and the music they make is loud.

The Streetkingz are brash and hip-hop, with abstract, colorful tattoos. The look of the Blackjax is influenced by the classic gangsters of the 1940s and ‘50s, but with a modern feel. The tattoos for that crew are more representational, and heavy in reds and blacks. Makeup designer Nathalie Gagné, a 25-year veteran of Cirque du Soleil, sketched dozens of tattoos en route to creating the look of each gang. That wasn’t the only new test for her, though. She had two considerations that ran counter to her two decades with the company: makeup that could stand up to fire instead of water; and makeup that revealed and reveled in the humans underneath. “We have a tendency to do more exotic characters,” she said. “For this show we're looking at faces, light. It's the eyes and the lips, the skin. That's the big difference.”

Gagné wasn’t the only one who had to deal with all the fire in R.U.N, either. Costume designer Kym Barrett had to tackle all that heat – plus the abundance of free-falls in the show – without the benefit of being able to frequently send performers off to change. That means that clothing had to allow for free movement but keep everyone carefully fireproofed and padded for the high-energy stunts throughout the show, without looking like they were riding the ladder truck to a five-alarm fire.

“A lot of what you want to do is show as much real skin as possible because it makes it much more connective to the audience,” Barrett said. “When we don't want them to be covered up so much, we had to generate fireproof tattoo-printed body stockings which not only protect them from the fire but cover up their pads. Trying to streamline people and make them look sexy and young and be able to move really well, it's difficult when you're trying to pad people so much.”