#ZARKANA BY CURQUE DU SOLEOL SERIES#

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for quite a few of the aah-inspiring feats performed by the company’s roster of 75 acrobats and performers of various nationalities. (One of them is shot from a cannon and careers around above the audience, brandishing what appeared to be a Spider-Man T-shirt.) There is also, of course, the requisite pair of jabbering, mugging, whimsical clowns, as delightful or as tiresome as ever, depending on your age and your tastes.

#ZARKANA BY CURQUE DU SOLEOL SERIES#

But while the recipe has been tweaked here and there, this new production plays to the company’s core strengths: it’s basically a series of familiar, reliably exciting old-school circus acts embroidered in baroque, sometimes bewildering art direction. (Perhaps she’s off having a very elaborate manicure?)Īlso unusually, and I am tempted to add unfortunately, all the songs in “Zarkana” (written by Nick Littlemore) are performed in English instead of the usual fantasy Esperanto that’s been a Cirque trademark. (This uncomfortable pleasure is also, I suppose, among the reasons audiences remain hungry for the much-derided “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”)Ĭareful attention to the song lyrics reveals a smidgen of storytelling: that top-hatted magician, called Zark and portrayed by the French-Canadian pop star Garou, is in love with a woman named Lia (the similarly single-named Cassiopée), who remains stubbornly elusive until the grand finale.

That’s because you spend the usual amount of time at the new extravaganza from this French-Canadian entertainment behemoth trembling in dread for the aerialists, contortionists and other daredevils plying their phenomenal wares onstage.Īs has been the case at Cirque shows I’ve seen in the past, more than once I had to resist the urge to leap from my seat and holler, “Get down from there, you senseless girl!” The tingly suspense generated by the many feats of gravity-defying gymnastics draws on our instinctive fear that at any moment someone could end up splattered across the stage. Sweeping across the football-field stage of Radio City Music Hall as the ring master of “Zarkana,” the latest Cirque du Soleil spectacular, he sings incessantly of an absent love, as if she could only be conjured by bombastic synthesizer-rich balladeering, a whole iPod playlist of Celine Dion songs delivered one after another.įor all the man’s throbbing vocalizing it’s pretty hard to feel his pain, I’m afraid, or even pay much heed to his lyric lamentations. The hearty-voiced fellow in the cherry-red top hat and matching silk cape obviously has a lot on his mind.

Zarkana by curque du soleol