© Jean-François Leblanc © 2006 Cirque du Soleil Inc recent Cirque du Soleil reviews more Lewis Whittington reviews

Directors Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon orchestrate elements of stadium rock, carnivale, drag-divacraft, psychedelic IMAX projections, props and spare parts from other Cirque shows to outsized extravagance. The draw here is that this show was focused on the music, featuring that internationally cryptic language of Cirquese, a dialectic melting pot, but is given the short shrift here. There is an robed trumpeter floating in and out evoking cosmic mysticism ala Miles Davis, but most the music is a sampling of international pop.

Yet there were surprise signatures from CDS shows- dance acrobats, fabric trapeze artists, comic stilt-walkers and harnessed spinners (sullied forever by Cher‘s farewell shows). There was even a return of the hoola-hoop master who moved so fast with so many silver hoops she looked like a spinning gyroscope.

Cirque always has a journeying figure as everyman, a floating Marcel Marceau knock-off, floats over all of this that you want to ground him forever, but it’s his dream so we’re stuck with him.

Highlights were the four-man acrobat team who use each other as vaulting apparatus in innovative ways. This quartet built daredevil body structures, but they enter and exit these positions choreographically and in fact, this is a new aesthetic singular to Cirque. A male contortionist on pegs about 15-feet in the air in a series of adagio handstands and levering his body in geometric shapes with steeled control. Conjured by two tribal Shaman, an African war god appears and his vaults, tumbles and somersaults are not only explosive, but exocized from the onus of ‘exotica’ presentation.
 

The botanical and outer space high-def film overlays (no one will forget the image of corpuscles drifting over stars), scaled ingeniously on multiple screens, was most effective with the transitioning live scenes, but was overdone within the scenes.

Lowlights were the corps dancers and musicians rolling in and out, with what could be the ‘Beyond Thunderdome’ dancers in platoon lines threatening the audience with toxic MTV dance moves. An underwater tableau drowned on its own theme. The only thing that was missing was Bottecelli’s Venus on a half-shell and making a pass at dream-boy.

Musical director Francis Collard culled the music from other shows, the ambient, tribal, world-beat taking second fiddle to pop songs in English, with some just straightforward rock numbers leading into treacly anthems, pumped out by the live bands.

The final number ‘Alegría’ CDS first show, brought the biggest roar from the audience. ''Life begins and ends as a question that has no answer…we are fragments of eternity floating through space and time.” godlike voice tells us. But guess what, the dreamer doesn’t drift out in space after all- he gets the gorgeous and talented female lead singer in the end. E = Mc² after all.