Review
ALEGRÍA
Cirque du Soleil
Directed by Franco Dragone
Runs until June 29
Parade Square, Currie Barracks
What does Homer Simpson say? "Service my inner child, dammit!"
Cirque du Soleil certainly obliges. The Quebec circus troupe’s touring Alegría, which has come to play in Calgary this month, is guaranteed to put you in a child-like state of awe and wonder at its physical feats and illusive imagery.
You’ll gasp as two bejewelled aerialists (Gaston Elie and Tuuli Paulina Räsänen) turn graceful corkscrews in midair before insouciantly grabbing their trapezes again. You’ll be entranced as a sylph-like dancer (Maria Silaeva) whirls a set of silvery hoops so swiftly that they appear to become huge, iridescent soap bubbles. And you may even be disturbed by the prowess of a contortionist (the truly remarkable Chimed Ulziibayar) whose taffy-like torso bends and folds into a living optical illusion.
But if you go looking for the vaunted theatrical side of Cirque, or even expect it to finally put to rest your deeply held suspicion that circus clowns simply aren’t funny, you’ll be disappointed.
I don’t want to judge the company by one show – and Alegría, which premiered in 1994, is one of Cirque’s older creations – but with world fame (and expensive tickets) comes an expectation of something a little more substantial.
Alegría teases us with such possibilities, adopting an avian theme – a baroque birdcage of a set by Michel Crête, fabulous feathery costumes by Dominique Lemieux – and turning its artistes into grotesque characters out of a Felliniesque fantasy, presided over by a martinet of a ringmaster (Evgueni Ivanov), a scowling little hunchback in whiteface and crimson frock coat, who skulks about the fringes of the action like a cross between Poe’s Hop-Frog and Richard III. In the end, however, nothing resembling a storyline emerges. At best, we are presented with various emotional textures – jealousy, sadness and, as the show’s Spanish title suggests, elation – but they come out of nowhere and quickly evaporate again. I guess if you want a story, you have to go to director Franco Dragone’s film spin-off, conveniently available on DVD and video – along with heaps of other Cirque souvenirs, not to mention frozen margaritas (this is a classy circus) – in the concourse of the company’s Grand Chapiteau tent.
So perhaps Cirque du Soleil, like that other inner-child phenom, Harry Potter, has been over-inflated by hype. Nonetheless, the troupe and its founding geniuses, Guy Laliberté and Daniel Gauthier, deserve credit for almost single-handedly changing North Americans’ perceptions of the circus in the last two decades. That once-shabby relic of bygone amusement, trundling from town to town with its humiliated animals and indifferent talent in tow, has become, as re-imagined by Cirque, a sophisticated and artistic entertainment that merges Broadway and the Big Top.
Where the mega-musicals of the 1980s and ’90s – Cats, Phantom of the Opera, et al. – often seemed to be circus-like spectacles, Cirque really is a circus, while at the same time borrowing cannily from those blockbusters. And not just in its marketing strategy. Alegría is a bit of a musical itself, complete with operatic pop songs lustily sung by a pair of divas (Eve Monpetit and Nathalie Noël) and played by a band of six puckish musicians in ratty powdered wigs who look like refugees from a production of Amadeus. The show’s rich score, composed by Réné Dupéré, seems to emphasize the international makeup of its 56-member cast, whipping up a world-music mélange that includes everything from the melancholy accordion of French cabaret to the sinuous rhythms of Asia and the Middle East.
The music proves more ambitious than the comedy, which is mostly handled by a trio of clowns (Yuri Medvedev, Antón Valén and Nikolai Terentiev) who, as if to apologize for their crassly slapstick brethren, are gentle and whimsical to a fault. These guys make Marcel Marceau look like one of the Three Stooges. At their most amusing, they offer tidy little spoofs of the feats we have just witnessed. But their longer skits prove tepid and uninvolving, their dull mime rescued only by the occasional spark of imagination – as when one of them, mimicking a train, sports a top hat that billows smoke like a funnel, or another, tearing up a letter, precipitates a snowstorm of paper that blows into the audience.
But the real highlights of Alegría are the superhuman performances of its acrobats and athletes, the kind of daredevil displays of skill that will always draw us back to the circus because they produce an authentic thrill that no digitally manipulated comic-book movie can ever replicate.
There’s the team of copper-coloured tumblers who execute endless flips in the air like well-tossed coins. There’s the fire dancer (Karl Sanft) juggling blazing batons, who reminds us of the power of live entertainment – it’s impossible to ignore the danger in such an act when, even halfway up the 2,500-seat tent, you can smell the kerosene and feel the heat. And finally, there’s the high-flying climax that plays on the birdcage motif, with nine nimble Russian acrobats leaping from their lofty perches like kamikaze canaries.
As a circus, Cirque du Soleil’s Alegría will astonish you. As theatre, it misses the trapeze. |
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