[ATTENDED: December 9, 2021] Cirque Dreams: Holidaze [moved from December 29, 2020]
My family loves going to Cirques. We have gone to many and we’ve enjoyed them all.
But we haven’t been to one in a few years, and the kids are older now, so we weren’t sure how much they’d remember about this kind of show. But we figured they’d enjoy it.
And, it was holiday themed!
The show is about 90 minutes long (with an intermission). And like most cirques, it features acrobatics: juggling, balancing, strong men, a Cyr wheel, and men and women spinning through the air.
The big difference between this show and other cirques is that there was a lot of singing!
Christmas was not so much the theme as the plot of the show. Set a the north pole, two people set about going to different stations to collect things for a gift for Santa. So they would travel from one act to another, watch the performer do his or her thing and then collect an item for the sack. A tenuous story, but you don’t really need a narrative for a show like this (although it is fun to have one).
The acts were fun–a guy who balanced on a cylinder on its side (after adding more and more things to it–it was quite impressive and his feigned fear was very effective). He then juggled as well. There was another juggler who bounced the balls off of boards to creative a very cool visual effect.
There was a woman who climbed two lengths of fabric and wrapped herself up in them as she floated down.
The most surprising and to me most fun segment was the jump rope team. They were funny and very talented and did things while jumping rope that I’ve never seen before.
There was also a main ringleader/comedian who did a lengthy skit involving bells–and one person who rang hers too much or too often or something. This was after the intermission and they were clearly using the time for the next set up. It ran a little too long, but was funny.
This show also featured the first time I’ve seen someone fail to do his act. He was on a tightrope. Obviously he was very talented and did the basics of his act perfectly. But when he tried to do the final trick (a somersault, if I remember correctly), he couldn’t stick the landing. I’ve seen acts fail before and they usually try it again and nail it. He tried a second time and failed. He tried a third time (by this time the music had even run out so it was totally quiet) and he failed again. But we all gave him a round of applause because we couldn’t have done anything that he’d already done.
I was surprised by the lack of feats of strength. Yes, there was the guy who pulled himself up onto a pole and then suspended himself in impossible ways (always a highlight), but the one brute strength guy only lifted a large pole and walked off with it. Weird.
The songs were good, but it really made the show feel more like a children’s show. Nothing wrong with that, but the whole show felt geared a little less toward the incredible and more toward the “entertain your kids” variety. Which again, is fine, but I wasn’t expecting that exactly.
I read a review of another show (also Holidaze, the company apparently does many different themed showed) where they mentioned several things that we didn’t see (which sounded like they might have been more interesting than what we saw). If this had been my first cirque, I would have been really impressed. This show only suffered from me having seen other, more impressive shows.
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