One night as my wife and I were enjoying an evening of Cirque du Soleil programming on A&E I saw advertisements for a production called Cirque Dreams: Jungle Fantasy coming to the State Theatre here in Minneapolis. Excited that Cirque was coming into town, I decided to get us the best tickets possible and payed roughly $50 each, landing us fifth row tickets with relative ease.

Well, when we arrived we were greated by a relatively simplistic set and a black and white program—no fancy CMYK or spot color printing to make it stand out. Fairly ordinary and lacking any pizazz. In reading the playbill I grew a bit concerned, thinking this doesn’t sound like the kind of Cirque du Soleil performance that I was anticipating. “Never bug a Lady Bug” “Bugs Climb Too” “Lady Bug Bop” ??? Uh, do we have the right theatre?

The house lights came down and the production begain with some so-so music and B-level acrobatic routines. The costumes were marginally imaginitive and the song-n-dance routine reminded me of something that Valley Fair might put together if they had a slightly bigger budget. To better describe it, it sorta had the whole gay-off-broadway sound but scored for kids, with most of the songs in basic major chord patterns and all-too-happy-sounding American songs with very bland ethnicity laced in the audio track.

I wondered where the dream-like, imaginitive characterization of Cirque would start to show but was progressively disappointed in the production.

The ONLY redeeming qualities of this production were the asian contortionists and the balancing duo. Their respective acts were creative, inventive and entertaining. The contortionists performed some crazy formations and balancing acts on one another in very graceful ways and the balancing duo were a great combination, weaving humor and near-clumsiness into their act.

But everything else? So so. There was some good jump rope acts and some okay aerialists, but all in all I felt like I was watching the people who didn’t make the cut with Cirque du Soleil.

The thing is, I wouldn’t have been so critical about this performance if they didn’t bill themselves as being like the original Cirque. Make no mistake…CIRQUE DREAMS IS NOT CIRQUE DU SOLEIL. It’s an overly-priced kid’s version of Cirque. The real deal at least doesn’t dumb down their performances and music for the sake of making it seemingly more accessible to kids—kids still enjoy it for what it is. But with Cirque Dreams, I often felt like I was watching a production put on by some pseudo Disney Kids theatre theater company. [They don't deserve the "re"]

All in all it wasn’t a horrible performance. Some seemed to enthusiastically enjoy the show. Natalie and I weren’t all that thrilled, though. Frankly, if they didn’t have the asian contortionists and a few of the aerialists, the show would have been a SEVERE waste of time and money.

Now let’s talk music, shall we?

I mentioned how it sounded like kids music all too often. Well, the center-stage female vocalist (”The Lady Bug”) had the whole jazz-hands-I’m-almost-as-feminine-as-the-gay-men-in-this-production thing going on and didn’t deliver a convincing production. She was too stale and stiff and offered no real meat to the performance. It also didn’t help that the music, the score and the words to the songs were TERRIBLE. I listened as closely as I could to make out the words and they were ALL FLUFF with no meaning at all, riding on over-used, stereotypical feel-good-psuedo-gay-broadway songs. I almost hate to put “broadway” in there, as a production like this would never make it within a hundred miles of broadway. They’d probably be shooed out.

All in all, I would probably not have made such a big stink if we had payed maybe $20 each to see the show. But the fact that Cirque Dreams is trying to model themselves after Cirque du Soleil and are charging SOOOOOO much money for the performances, they are opening themselves up for criticism.

If Cirque Dreams is coming to your area, don’t bother. Stay home and watch the real thing on TV. Or better yet, take the trip to Vegas and see their Vegas production.

October 8, 2006, 5:13 pm

Filed under: Culture, General, Performance

2 Comments »

1. Jamison said,

   October 8, 2006 @ 5:22 pm

   Ouch dude… that sucks. Sorry to hear it was such a bad show? Did you manage to get tickets to Spam a Lot though?

2. Michael said,

   October 8, 2006 @ 5:27 pm

   Yeah, I literally JUST got tickets for a Sunday night performance, Row 5 on the far left end.

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