Cirque du so Fey

Magic?

Non!

C’est MAGIQUE!!!

Yep, I took in the pomp, circumstance, pizzaz and spectacle – sorry, SPECTACLE!!! – of the Cirque du Soleil Delirium show that toured through Toronto earlier this week. The tickets were part of Alana’s birthday gift, and it’s not something I’d go to normally, but hey, it ain’t that often an event comes along where a clown could possibly get hurt, so it sounded promising. With tickets well over $100 apiece, I was practically banking on some sort of clowntastrophe, in fact.

But before this could happen there were jokes, mainly the one where we paid $25 to park for two hours at the Air Canada Centre. For that price the attendants should’ve been wearing greasepaint and riding unicycles. But I digress…

The show itself was pretty cool, and pretty much what I expected. There were outrageous costumes (like a dress that covered the entire stage), incredible feats of physical prowess (stilt-walkers, high-wire balancing acts, scantily-clad dudes throwing other scantily-clad dudes up in the air, etc.) and enough dramatic gesturing to make a mime jizz all over his glass box.

The best parts of the show were the lights and giant set pieces, though. Some really sublime and often intense effects were created by projecting images on massive screens and curtains, and by bathing the stage, performers and props in an impressive spectrum of colour. The production designers really know how to paint with light. I bet a good chunk of the baby boomer crowd secretly wished they still smoked pot. (Check out the Delirium photo gallery for the evidence.)

Of course, aside from the unavoidable pretension of the New Age-y performances, the worst thing about the Cirque du Soleil is the music, and the focus of Delirium happens to be music. It’s so…what’s the best way to describe it…all dressed up with no place to go. Take the innocuous world beat you’d hear at a Starbucks, mix in some safe adult contemporary, and then add tribal drum beats (they call it “urban tribal beat”) cranked to eleven to make the whole thing seem important. There was even a cliché drum-off! However, even lamer was the cliché-looking rock guitarists they brought out to make things “edgy,” – because they don’t want anyone to think the Cirque don’t know how to rock – sorry, ROQUE!!!

I guess what it comes down to with the Cirque is that some of the style-gestures are just way too try-hard (that and there aren’t enough clown injuries). I mean, they’re not gonna blow my mind by carpet-bombing me with pageantry. At a certain point it becomes kind of innocuous, and I actually fell asleep for part of the show. It’s too bad because those performers must bust their tights-covered asses to pull off that stuff. I can only imagine the choreographer during training:

“More ennui, Henri! More savoir faire, Claire! More je ne sais quoi, Francoise! Let’s see some hustle, you JERQUES!!! ”

*On a side note, I looked up “fey” on dictionary.com to make sure I was using it right, and it gave this example of the word usuage : “She's got that fey look as though she's had breakfast with a leprechaun” (Dorothy Burnham).” So be warned, the next time you appear fey, people might just think you’ve just had breakfast with a leprechaun.