Susan Granger’s review of “Cirque du Soliel: Kurios” (Randall’s Island)
Cirque du Soliel’s blue-and-yellow striped Grand Chapiteau is back on Randall’s Island – delivering dazzling delights. Blending distinctive characters, engaging music and stylish choreography into surreal storytelling, it’s sensational – their best show in many years!
Subtitled, “Cabinet of Curiosities,” it’s set amid a steampunk carnival that’s filled with fantastical clockwork toys, Victorian amusement machines, pianolas, phonograph horns and old-fashioned manual typewriters.
It begins as a simulated train pulls into a station, disgorging fashionable women, mustachioed men and an accordion-pleated fellow who join with jugglers, dancers and percussionists in a sensational opening number.
That’s followed by a fast-paced succession of acrobatic acts, each a little gem. One features a tiny ballerina who gets tossed around by huge strongman. Another introduces men wearing fish tails, bouncing up and down in perfect teamwork on a special Acro Net that resembles a trampoline. A pretty bicyclist soars high in the air. And there are the usual Asian contortionists.
Remember when every circus had a “freak show”? Cirque transforms a tiny woman, Mini-Lili (Antania Satsura from Belarus), less than three-feet tall, into an elegant miniature Mae West, whimsically toted around in a bathosphere.
Spanish hand puppeteer Nico Baixas creates magic, using a video camera that records shadowy finger-images that are projected on a hot-air balloon that becomes a big screen. An audience member is invited on-stage to participate on a ‘date’ with an engaging clown who winds up impersonating a cat. And perhaps the most amazing ‘staging’ emerges in “Upside Down World,” a dinner party that transforms into a triumph of rigging with a man climbing on stacked-up chairs.
Written and directed by Michel Laprise with creative direction by Chantal Tremblay, it’s visually enhanced by Stephane Roy’s set, Philippe Guillotel’s costumes, and Marin LaBrecque’s lighting. In many ways, it resembles Martin Scorsese’s film “Hugo” (2011), set in 1930s Paris.
Cirque du Soliel is currently touring 21 different productions but “Kurios” is perhaps its best EVER!
“Kurios” will play on New York’s Randall’s Island through November 27. For tickets, visit www.cirquedusoliel.com/kurios.