Cirque du Simoleans

by guest columnist Doug Nufer

SOMEWHERE AFTER your credit-card account has been nicked to the tune of $35-$70, after a musical of uplifting fusion schmaltz that should have died in the Bloch’s Restaurant men’s room in 1978, the real show begins in the Cirque du Soleil production of Saltimbanco.

A squad of up to 16 acrobats spins up and down four poles arranged in a quadrangle. Inventive, daring, and visually dazzling, this is the kind of act I’ve been led to expect from what has been widely acclaimed as the new greatest show on earth.

While other shows have replaced cage acts, death-defying stunts, and the seedier legal and illegal attractions of the midway with sophisticated presentations of the circus arrts, Cirque du Soleil is the show against which others are measured, while it thrives in a class by itself.

Even champions of the loaded-for-bear traditional shows, as epitomized by Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey, give Cirque du Soleil its due. While there are traditional circus acts some shows do better, nobody tops the Cirque for sheer presentational panache.

The sound and lighting quality (as opposed to the quality of the music) have the production values of a Broadway show.

Rather than rattle off a revue of stunts, the Cirque builds each show around a story or theme. The costumes, at best, reinforce this unity of purpose. Clowns are not only expert mimes and accomplished acrobats, they sing and dance.

But then, it may occur to you that those clowns can’t dance half as well as the dancers in a Broadway show, let alone as well as the dancers in a soda-pop commercial; that the choreography is better when they change sets than when they just dance; that you’ve really had enough clever miming to last a lifetime; and that the production values are nice, but the clock is ticking and, apart from the acrobats on the poles, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Couldn’t they cut corners on the lights and sound and hire a few more acrobats?

There is a terrific juggling act–a woman who does a quick flash of balls after working her way up through a variety of cascades, fountains, and bouncing patterns with three, four, and five balls.

My favorite act was a high-wire routine where a woman does back flips between parallen wires at different heights and finishes off with a “walk of death” slide down a wire at a 45-degree angle to the ground.

An act where acrobats catapult, twisting and flipping, to land on each other’s shoulders was also quite good.

Flamenco-dancer twins in the first half of the show find symmetry in the second half’s twin strong men. A mime dressed as a boy who makes funny noises in the first half also cavorts in the second half, idulging himself and mime lovers (wherever they may be).

There is, however, an interesting twist to his second set, when our hero snatches someone out of the audience and drags him to the ring. The rube played along so well, I thought he was a plant, doing a variation of the old Pete Jenkins act (some hotshot rider masquerades as a drunk in the crowd and then stumbles to the nearest horse and out-rides everyone in the ring); but others who attended different performances saw different folks pulled from the audience (one of whom told Bret Fetzer that he was there with his family).

This breakdown of barriers between performers and audience is noteworthy; particularly in view of the traditional adversarial relationship between circus people and rubes. Rather than knife you with gaffed games of “chance” on the old midway, though, at Cirque du Soleil clowns roam the stands, sitting on laps, stealing a shirt, grabbing a gal and running around with her, throwing popcorn. Whether you find this irritating or funny, it does the essential chore of policing the stands to make sure some rube doesn’t start popping flash bulbs.

Not one to revel in the opportunity to touch clowns, I prefer the old separation of ace and rube, where the aces do stunts that verge on the impossible. Of the newer shows, Circus Chimera is the best I’ve seen for presenting consistently audacious (if inconsistently executed) acts. Rather than cheapen the show, the occasional failures of performers attempting feats of supreme difficulty only enhance the value of their eventual success.

The circus acts of the Saltimbanco show I saw were flawlessly done and, in the case of the stationary trapeze act, mundane. A semi-flying trapeze/bungee jump has more variation, but the spectacle of aerialists bouncing back up to their trapezes is a pale reminder of “The Cranes” of the Russian Circus.

(Not that every new aerial act ought to be compared to perhaps the single greatest flying exhibition ever done, but the problem with shows that rely on wired “mechanics” to tether flyers rather than safety nets to catch them is that these compromised newer acts can seem eternally outdone by even tame versions of the centerpiece aft of the traditional circus.)

Maybe it’s unfair to compare Cirque du Soleil to Ringling or to Cats, unfair to violate the first principle of criticism by failing to prioritize or even consider what the artist framing the show is trying to do.

To me, the story is beside the point of seeing great performers do incredible feats; but what, after all, is the story? For the added cost of the program, this information is available, along with the names of those on the show.

In the Cirque du Simoleans, production values talk.

Notions like giving credit where credit is due walk.

(Saltimbanco is extended thru Sept. 9 at the Renton Boeing plant, southeast corner of Lake Washington. 1-800-678-5440.)

TOMORROW:Figuring out this whole ’80s nostalgia business.

ELSEWHERE:

• Finally, a new Godzilla movie that knows the proper, Japanese way to treat the character, as opposed to the one made by Sony….