Le Cirque du Soleil's OVO
All photo credits: Cirque du Soleil.
From the first act on, we got blown away. An acrobat was doing a dance on top of a stairless spiral stair rail, culminating with him doing a handstand on one hand. Yeah, we grumbled, cute yoga, but can he do it with his left hand? And then as if he heard our thoughts, he swapped hands back and forth. And from then on, it was a sequence of more and more amazing bewilderment.
The conceit of Cirque du Soleil is to wrap the sequence of acts into a narrative, and envelop everything in their own live music (which you can purchase as a CD during intermission), so as to present a continuous spectacle rather than a sequence of skits. Also: no animals. The concept this time around is bugs, which provide the colorful thematic material for the sets, the outlandish make-ups and the creative costumes, and some fragments of a story line, revolving around said bugs finding an egg.
So instead of Chinese acrobats spinning cylindrical shapes with their feet while lying on their backs, we get ants spinning kiwi slices and corn cobs. A similar act we had seen before, except they offered a new twist to it, tossing each other up from one pair of feet to the next. Neat.
The theme weaves in some poetics, as the set up of a rope act as a chrysalis attached to the rope morph into a butterfly. Some are pretty much basic circus acts, with the bugs window dressing or not, but pretty darn good ones: a diabolo artist juggled with three diabolos; a tightrope master unicycled on a string while doing a handstand.
We had prime seats, but they ended up straight below the starting point of a trapeze acts (a feat of strength and precision and aw-shuck gymnastics: guy takes other guy on his trapeze, holds him by the hands while he hangs from his legs, toss him up in the air to land on the arms of two other guys on an elevated platform, who then toss him back). So they drop dandruff on us when they chalked their hands. And chalk they did. If you're trapeze artists are on fire, chalk gets in your eyes.
The last act involved trampolines and walking up 30ft walls and you got to see it to believe it. We gush, but it was that good. Most everything was fantastic, but for the wordless clownish skits in between, which were somewhat tedious. We're all for physical comedy, but we saturated early. They involved bugs trying to mate, a heavy handed comedy of seduction where a chubby lady bug put the ovaries in Ovo. We saturated with the music as well: the live house band delivers a mix of thudding techno-ish beats and some bossas which all sounds like the happy hour soundtrack in a FiDi bar. Also, we enjoy mixing things up, but messing up Beethoven's 5th symphony with La Cucarracha is downright tacky. But Cirque du Soleil would not be circus if it successfully avoided all tackiness, now would it?
Show runs through Jan 24th, ticket prices from $42 (children between 2 and 12 on a week night) to $250 (tapis rouge lounge)