![]() ![]() One used to associate such acts with feminine pulchritude and lightly sleazy venues (but I’m showing my age, I realize). If anything, the acrobatics are even more heart-stopping.Ī man does a solo act on a pole. The acts themselves in some cases have changed since Kurios last came to town, and there’s been some re-ordering. Scene from ‘Kurios – Cabinet of Curiosities.’ Photo © Martin Girard shootstudio.ca. This show, in particular, might have benefitted from more balance and nuance. I also am less of a fan of the full-volume, over-amped blaring of the vocalist and band that seems a signature of the company’s production values. I found especially creepy the giant hand that was built like a cross between a riveted-metal robot and a piece of arsenal, which served later in one of the acts as a platform for three hyper-mobile female acrobats. There are only occasional signs of how rampant technology will come to dominate us and threaten the world. It’s a world born in nostalgia, a time when the world seemed manageable, and yes, to eyes full of wonder, hopeful. Although there is an enormous mouth of a train tunnel, which dominates the set upstage, when the train comes snaking through the space powered by our cast, it is more scaled as toy-train technology. I love most that it remains mostly human scale, while some of Cirque du Soleil’s other recent projects as featured in Las Vegas seem over-the-top, tech-driven. Kurios carries the audience into the co-creation of a world where discoveries are meant to delight us in this playground of man. With the exquisite set and props designed by Stéphane Roy and the highly imaginative, steampunk-inspired costumes designed by Philippe Guillotel, the effect is exhilarating. It is indeed a “cabinet of curiosities,” all about the richness of the human imagination in a once-upon-a-time age where science meets art. ![]() The stage represents a fantastical, alternate futuristic world, littered with bell jars, manual typewriters, and phonographs with elaborate horns, through the golden glow of the gaslit world of the past. The show is like looking into the insides of a watch or through the wrong end of a telescope. The director/writer of the production, Michel Laprise, created the show to preserve and celebrate the delights of human scale and man and woman’s propensity for curiosity. Periodically, a chorus appears as a group of assistants of odd sorts they include three clownish mad scientists, a set of the quirkiest and most adorable leather-and-metal clad robots anyone would ever want to see, and a quartet of male swim-hunks dressed à la mode (early 1900s) and sporting sassy wiggling fishtails. Structurally, it introduces the recurring characters in the evening’s entertainment: The Seeker (Anton Valen), a white-haired irrepressible scientist a “Mentalist” (Andrey Nikitin) with an oversized turbaned frontal lobe that lights up revealing gears for brains a hugely rotund gentleman (Microcosmos) whose bathysphere-like stomach houses a little lady not three feet tall the lady herself (Rina Hadchiti), who elegantly parades swathed in a fur stole and who has a special power and symbiotic relationship with Microcosmos a hoop-skirted Klara (Kazuha Ikeda), who snakes across the stage and uses her hoops and wire-like arms to channel invisible waves an accordion-pleated giant (Nico Baixas), who folds and unfolds himself gloriously a Saint-Exupéry–styled pilot (James Gonzales Correa), who shares his delight about early flight by sending paper airplanes out into the audience from high aloft inside the circus tent. If anything the premise and the marvelous, extended unfolding number that opens the show are even more delicious and tender viewed today. ![]() As something of a die-hard groupie, I was also curious how the show, Kurios, first brought to the area in 2016, would hit me since the world had inarguably changed. Those were the words from my companion last evening, Pete, a rising sixth-grader, and this was his first time experiencing the indomitable global phenomenon that is Cirque du Soleil.
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