It’s about 10 degrees Fahrenheit and windy in Montreal, and that’s not the only frigid breeze sweeping through this capital of Cirque du Soleil.

For the first time, Cirque has a bona fide dud of a show in Las Vegas, attendance is underwhelming for its production in Macau, and critics are already sharpening their knives over two new shows due to open this month, one in New York and another in Vegas. A development deal with Dubai World isn’t playing out as expected largely because Dubai World’s development activities have been, uh, complicated by its financial implosion.

Yet somehow—per the company’s name—it’s always sunny inside the office at Cirque’s international headquarters of cheerful Cirque CEO Daniel Lamarre. Not only is he undeterred by setbacks that he’s largely unwilling to acknowledge as setbacks, but he is laying plans for even more rapid growth for the company that could make the brand as ubiquitous as, say, Disney on Ice.

This is, after all, the year that Lamarre expects the company to surpass $1 billion in ticket sales for the first time on its 21 productions that include seven resident shows on the Las Vegas Strip. The latest, Viva Elvis, officially opens tonight at the new Aria Resort, with its vaudevillian offering Banana Shpeel starting preview performances at the Beacon in New York on March 17. After that, a new, presently unnamed touring production is due to bow in Montreal in April.

By the summer of 2011, the company expects to have opened resident shows for two of the world’s most famous venues, Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan and the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, and still the machine in Montreal will continue to churn at high gear.

“I can easily see Cirque developing two to three new shows a year,” said Lamarre, brought in as chief operations officer in 2001 by owner Guy Laliberte after helming Canada’s top TV network with the express mission of accelerating the company’s growth. “To produce three shows a year, it means I have to have nine shows in the making. Right now I’ve got 2010, 2011, and 2012 planned out.”

(Click here for a slideshow of Cirque's productions in Las Vegas, in order of debut.)

Such a notion is far afield of the origins of Cirque, which Laliberte founded by pulling together a ragtag group of Canadian street performers and acrobats in the early 1980s. Back then, Lamarre was a public relations specialist who donated his expertise to the group for free as a service to the arts. In 1990, the troupe famously performed at the Santa Monica Pier where Vegas mogul Steve Wynn saw them, built them a permanent theater at his new Treasure Island resort for a show called Mystere, and launched them an empire.