Walking into Radio City last Thursday, I was already starting to feel less than excited about seeing Cirque du Soleil's new show Zarkana. There were costumed performers all over the damn place singing, clowning, miming, and carrying around silly umbrellas. Let the great oversell begin.
I took my (admittedly excellent) seat and began to feel even less confident about my potential enjoyment as two clowns roamed the audience interacting with the audience and other performers posed for photo ops. I'm not against interactivity and scene-setting, but it just all felt so tacky and forced, just oversized and underwhelming, not to mention terribly familiar.
It didn't get a lot better from there.
First, let's talk about the big French Canadian elephant in the room--Cirque du Soleil can do a lot of things right. Constructing a narrative that feels coherent and cohesive is not among them. Which would be fine...if they didn't try. But here we have a magician named Zark who seems to think he's lost his powers even though he really hasn't, and then there's this lady he seems to love who...is a snake? For one song? But then a beautiful lady? In a box? When I've seen Cirque shows before they've been in languages I don't speak. That, it seems, has been to their benefit. Because the lyrics to the (terrible) songs here are in English and reveal only further how little anything makes actual sense.
There are two main singers. Ask me or the person I went with to identify who was worse, and we'd have different answers. For me, the lady just sort of disappeared into the background and Zark was full nails on a chalkboard. My friend felt the exact opposite. I think what can be deduced from this is mostly that they were both bad, but in different ways. Points for originality?
There is a lot of clowning in the show. It appeared that this was because the stage is very large, and this is not a troupe known to leave empty space when they can instead fill it with unnecessary nonsense. Which explains why what could have been a very exciting 60 minutes of circus acts was about two and a half hours of drudgery.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy myself at all. The trapeze artists were amazing. There was a solo dance number (one person on stage ALONE!) that was probably the best moment of the night. For all of three minutes, he was allowed to do his thing, and it was extraordinary. There was also a ladder climbing/balancing act that...I'll just say that until I realized there were harnesses involved, I almost soiled myself.
Yes, an hour of death-defying stunts presented in a row, totally unbroken, would be numbing. But in a few tiny moments--a lone hula hooper crossing the stage, two organists pounding through a song intro--you could see how things could have been more exciting if the creators allowed their cast's talents to shine individually rather than throw a million and two things at the stage to see what would stick. I don't hate everything Cirque does. O, in Vegas, is truly beautiful, but that's because all of the many elements tend to actually work together. It's still overkill, but it's a balanced overkill. And their Beatles show, Love, also in Vegas, is similarly over-stuffed, but hey--the music actually sounds good. Lacking a single song you'd want to listen to or any sense of harmony on stage, Zarkana is the worst that Cirque has to offer, run amok all over Radio City. A pity. And a waste.
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