Cirque Du Soleil Alegria

September 23, 2024

The expansively creative team behind Cirque du Soleil finds itself with a challenge somewhat akin to what God must've confronted on the eighth day: What to do for an encore? The previous Cirque productions did nothing less than reinvent our notion of the circus, and reintroduce audiences to the concept of wonderment. For the company's fifth show, "Alegria," the team returned to the formula that has worked four times already. If Cirque veterans bemoan the absence of mind-bending new acts, it's nonetheless likely all but the most cynical will come away dazzled and delighted. Packed houses are assured under Cirque's trademark blue-and-yellow big top.

The expansively creative team behind Cirque du Soleil finds itself with a challenge somewhat akin to what God must’ve confronted on the eighth day: What to do for an encore? The previous Cirque productions did nothing less than reinvent our notion of the circus, and reintroduce audiences to the concept of wonderment. For the company’s fifth show, “Alegria,” the team returned to the formula that has worked four times already. If Cirque veterans bemoan the absence of mind-bending new acts, it’s nonetheless likely all but the most cynical will come away dazzled and delighted. Packed houses are assured under Cirque’s trademark blue-and-yellow big top.

That formula consists of a few key elements: A handful of acts of death- or physics-defying human

derring-do; an at-once humorous and vaguely threatening emcee; a stunning visual style that owes more to street theater than Las Vegas; and a troupe of clowns and performers who entertain between acts and always seems to include (for reasons not at all clear) a fat person with weird things sticking out of the side of his or her head.

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Each Cirque du Soleil production hearkens back to the very earliest, prehistoric roots of circuses — of people doing odd things for the amusement and amazement of others — while encompassing a thoroughly modern sensibility.

Most Cirque productions also purport to advance a vague theme or plotline that links the various acts, albeit loosely. With “Alegria,” there’s a recurrent image of stepping through the looking glass into a new and wondrous world, and a stronger-than-ever motif of man defying nature.

The program opens with a trapeze duo performing near-mirror images on separate bars, and ends more than two hours later with the far more thrilling Flying Lev. This Russian team of aerialists combines the art of trapeze with uneven parallel bars gymnastics that leads audiences to conclude that the laws of gravity just don’t apply here.

Second on the program is the “house troupe” of acrobats (the other acts join for just this production). Working on springy mats that seem to emerge from below the stage, they fly, flip and float like pinwheels freed from their moorings. The how’d-they-do-that amazement of this routine couples with the beauty of their movements.

The house troupe — whose head-high, shoulders-back prancing about the stage gives them the look of heraldic hood ornaments — returns in the second act for a Russian bars routine that is something like the balance beam of gymnastics, but with a flexible board held up by two people.

If these acts contradict gravity, Hawaii’s Lisiate Tuione Tovo challenges the laws of fire. Alternately twirling, licking, lying on and otherwise commanding a flaming bar, Tovo’s performance touches an almost primal fascination with the beauty and hazard of fire. This is likely to be the act most people are still talking about days later.

Or perhaps it will be Mongolian contortionists Ulziibayar Chimed and Nomin Tseveendorj. These small, impossibly flexible young girls elicit applause — and a healthy dose of the creeps — as they bend and flow as if the limitations of the human skeletal system are irrelevant to them.

Between acts — when the hood ornaments aren’t prancing about — clowns Dmitry Bogatirev, Serguei Chachelev and Slava Polunin perform. Their miming sometimes comments on the previous feat, acting as inept surrogates for us in the audience. Other times they perform self-contained routines. A couple seems poignantly to address fears of closeness and friendship.

And the clowns’ final routine explores the classic clowning motif of people befuddled by themost mundane of matters, in this case picking up a small piece of litter. Before they are through, they must confront a full-blown hurricane that sends confetti, seemingly miles of toilet paper and the clowns themselves hurtling into the audience.

It’s a hilarious routine, although one that wouldn’t seem out of place in a more conventional circus, which is something early Cirque shows never did, and which is the main gripe about “Alegria.” The joy and wonder of Cirque du Soleil is that it offers a unique series of acts and way of seeing a circus, different even from other circuses.

Christian Racoux — he of the misshapen body and slightly ominous, panther-like movements — is fine as comedian/emcee. But audiences miss the hilarity and danger and sheer silent genius of David Shiner, who played that role in Cirque’s “Nouvelle Experience” a few years ago, before going on to star with Bill Irwin in the magical “Fool Moon” here and on Broadway.

Most disappointing is strong man Rick ZumWalt, who appears to be, well, not all that strong. When he pulled a man out of the audience to arm-wrestle, he very nearly lost. He looks the part, but breaks the magic spell cast by the other performers.

It’s not hard to imagine that new, awe-inspiring acts are harder to come by for the Quebec-based company’s fifth incarnation. But there’s enough that’s unique and unimaginable about “Alegria” to move virtually everyone. If it succeeds at nothing else, this production serves to reaffirm that we mere mortals still have the ability to be amazed.

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