Delirium

Cirque du Soleil at the Savvis Center

Delirium, which was in town for three performances this past weekend [May 12 and 13, 2006], is described as “A Cirque du Soleil Live Music Event”. The description is highly accurate, and also a bit of a warning for anyone expecting anything like a typical Cirque du Soleil show.

Granted, the phrase “typical Cirque du Soleil show” is a bit of an oxymoron, but the plain fact is that Delirium resembles a rock concert more than it does Cirque du Soleil's trademark mix of spectacular circus acts and theatrical flash. That's not to say that there aren't some stunning individual performances. There just aren't enough of them, in my view, to fully justify labeling this as a Cirque event.

That said, Delirium is still an impressive show. Performed on a 20-foot-wide 130-foot-long platform, Delirium makes extensive use of scrims and projection equipment to display animation and live images - some of which appear strikingly three-dimensional - to accompany and reinforce the action on stage. At one point, for example, a singer decked out in a headdress that Carmen Miranda might have worn had she used major hallucinogens slowly rises into the air above the stage, her skirt billowing out around her until it turns into a massive tent on which a rapidly-changing series of patterns are projected, as though the skirt were a surreal volcano spewing color. At other times the stage appears to be flooded with water, butterflies, or stars. It's no wonder that my companion described the effect as something like an LSD trip without the pharmaceuticals.

The music, which is non-stop, includes twenty of what are described as the company's “most memorable musical moments” re-mixed by Quebec producer, composer and arranger Francis Collard. They're performed by an impressive array of musicians from around the world. You can see a list of the featured artists at the show's web site, but for the record they are: percussionist brothers El Hadji Fall Diouf and Pape Abdou Karim Diouf of Senegal; the South American group Gaïa; keyboardist and band leader Ric'key Pageot; Italian percussionist Raffaele Artiglieri; Brazilian Italo-Cuban singer Dessy Di Lauro and Jacynthe from Canada. They hold forth on a variety of instruments, most of which appear to belong to the percussion family. Aside from a wide array of stationary and portable drums, there's also a “planet drum” (a 16-foot-wide dome that contains sixteen percussion instruments and which doubles as a launching platform for the acrobats) and something that sounded like the Mother of All Bass Drums.

In a one of several departures from the Cirque's usual practice, English lyrics have been used (as opposed to the “invented language” usually employed) but given the acoustics of the Savvis Center (and, for that matter, most of arena spaces for which the show is designed) it generally didn't matter.

The actual circus performers, while out-numbered by the musicians and dancers, are nevertheless as impressive as you would expect. I'd like to mention them all by name but, alas, there are no programs and the web site mentions only a few. Adam Reed is the striking Gate Keeper, an eccentric character on stilts who is the closest thing the show has to a clown. Reed manages the stilts so easily that it became easy to think of him as some odd alien creature rather than a very skilled human. Irina Akimova does an eye-popping specialty with iridescent hula-hoops that's an intriguing mix of juggling, dance and tumbling.

Among the performers who are not named, there is a quartet of amazing hand-stand/tumbling artists who appear to have superhuman muscle control and aerialists of all kinds, including the protagonist Bill, who spends nearly the entire show suspended just below a huge sphere that floats about the stage and changes color and character with the action.

That action is continuous and, as I noted in my review of Cirque's Dralion back in 2003, there's often so much going on at once - all of it fascinating - that there's a danger of sensory overload. There was certainly a danger of auditory overload as far as I was concerned. In the final analysis, I felt that Delirium's creators had rather overestimated the entertainment value of the purely musical aspects of the show. Your mileage may vary, but I would have preferred more solo circus acts and fewer solo singers.

I would also have preferred to see something interesting done with the giant boat-like “curve-bridge” that's slowly assembled in the final moments of the show and which finally dominates the stage. There's an old saying in the theatre that you don't show a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I if you're not going to fire it before the end of the evening. Likewise, you don't put the equivalent of a massive metal seesaw on stage if all you're going to do is stand on it and sing.

Speaking of singing: when Delirium comes to your town (see the web site for a list of venues), you might want to consider showing up a half-hour after the scheduled curtain time. That way you can avoid the rather uninteresting set by Cirque's opening act, the “multi-ethnic, multi-lingual singer and songwriter” Nitza. I'm essentially out of touch with the contemporary music scene so I'd never heard of her (but then, neither had my twentysomething god-daughter), but judging from the performance she seems to be a somewhat watered-down version of the late Israeli superstar Ofra Haza. It's unclear why she's even there. Since Delirium runs for two uninterrupted hours, the cynic in me suspects that it simply offers an excuse for an intermission during which the local venue can hawk its over-priced food and drink.

The bottom line on Delirium, in my view, is that while it may be Cirque du Soleil “lite” it's better than no Cirque du Soleil at all. If you're out here where the company's appearances are rare, Delirium is worth seeing for that reason alone.

Besides, there hasn't been any good acid around for years.

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