The La Torre Story (so far...): HalfAChicken.com - 10/2/14 - Has Cirque du Soleil lost its touch?

Originally published on 10/2/14 at HalfAChicken.com
https://halfachicken.com/justinavalon/article/102

The Spell is Broken: Has Cirque du Soleil lost its touch?

With its penchant for death-defying acrobatic routines, grandiose visual flair, and overall vibe of whimsy and mystery, the famed fantastical French-Canadian feature of the Vegas stage known as Cirque du Soleil is truly a unique offering. I’ve watched quite a few Cirque shows now, and each show brings its own flavor to the table, from the oriental fire-themed Ka to the sensual and sexy Zumanity. Just about every major hotel on The Strip houses its own Cirque soiree, and you can literally spend all week watching all of them and never run out of things to see.

Or you can just watch Zumanity over and over again. Your call.

HOWEVER! It is inevitable that all good things must come to an end. Sure, you probably won’t feel it at first. You’ll hit the sublime Cirque show trifecta of KA, O, and Mystere and still be giddy as a schoolgirl. Zumanity will probably continue to titillate you for a few cold nights after you see it. Heck, maybe you’ll dust off the shiny glove and black jacket and get reacquainted with Michael Jackson at ONE…in a platonic, respectable way, of course. *AHEM*

C’mon Cirque, the trial was almost 10 years ago. LET IT GO.

But like every TV show you loved and watched, eventually it starts to get stale. Sooner or later, you’ll sit down to a more recently-released Cirque show and walk out thinking to yourself, Huh, that was just…okay. It will lack the “pop” and polish of the earlier shows you’ve seen. Or worse, it will leave you with a feeling of disappointed repulsion, kind of like the sequels to The Matrix (which many people, including myself, still deny the existence of).

Yeah, watching the sequels to The Matrix kinda feels like that. Only in your balls.

Let’s take a look at the last Cirque show I saw: Michael Jackson ONE. I’ve been a fan of MJ’s career since my dad showed his music to me back in the 90’s, and I’ll admit to trying to learn how to moonwalk because it looked so cool in the videos. However, I felt that ONE was a complete miss on Cirque’s part. It’s not that the show didn’t have its moments; the neon-lit suits dancing to “Billy Jean” in the shadows and the people moonwalking up and down the walls of the theater were actually pretty cool. But overall, there was nothing really making it more defined or memorable compared to other shows, unless you count the fact that they turned the lights down every time an acrobatic or dance routine started and attempted to use strobes and special effect lighting as their sole source of illumination.

Oh hey, the lights came back–…uh, I’d like them back off please.

ONE is an example of a disappointing plague of “not trying hard enough anymore” that seems to have spread rampantly among the showrunners of Cirque. While it is true that each show still has its own theme and sense of aesthetics, there are some that are clearly more creative and thought-out than others.

When you look at shows like O or Ka, they have this “big” feeling about them. The scenes fully encompass their themes of water and fire, respectively, and everything is done on a grand scale, from the giant complex acrobatics to the clever incorporation of their elements into the outfits and settings. You can tell that the people who made those shows knew exactly what they wanted and executed it beautifully.

In contrast, the newer shows don’t feel as polished. ONE felt like a hodgepodge of MJ music video clips that attempted to cover and sum up the King of Pop’s illustrious career, but instead came off as an elementary school art collage cobbled together by people who were never in the same room at the same time as each other. Zarkana’s aesthetic of “trippy magical circus” seemed a little redundant, since just about every other Cirque show is already inherently representative of a magical carnival-esque occasion while still having their own unique themes on top of that. (Although maybe Zarkana’s lack of a real theme is a theme itself, in which case bravo to the writers for actually being clever). And when watching the classical cinema-themed Iris, one can’t help but think that they took the entirety of their special effects and acrobatic equipment budget and put it towards making costumes via cobbling vintage outfits and spare camera parts together, the results of which should never have even left the concept art stage of production.

Plus, the stage design for Iris was H.P. Lovecraft-level horrifying.

I can’t tell if I should be laughing or frightened.

I know I sound like an old fart for saying all this, but the Cirque that I grew up loving had enchanted and awed me with its creativity and brilliance. Whoever is running the show nowadays has clearly tried to make things too hip, too current, too contemporary, and as a result, the Circus Under the Sun has trapped itself within a perpetual eclipse of mediocrity. Luckily for them, the solution is simple. Cirque can reclaim the magic it once had by going back to what it does best: embracing the story they’re trying to tell, doing it big, doing it epic, and never forgetting the whimsy and mystery that drew people to the show in the first place. I still hold on to the hope that my beloved Cirque will find its way once again, but until then, I’ll enjoy re-watching the 3 or 4 shows I actually do like.