Cirque du Soleil’s Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities at the Stampede Grounds through May 25
cirquedusoleil.com/kurios or 1-800-450-1480
Four stars out of five.
Did a show ever capture the soundtrack of a city better than Kurios did Calgary Thursday night?
The jubilant new show from Cirque du Soleil contains many moving parts, but the one constant throughout is a soundscape that the show’s director Michel Laprise describes as electro-swing.
That involves a little klezmer, a little clarinet, even some theremin, to concoct a sound that evokes a world the show’s producers call the retro-future, all of which looks a little like a Charlie Chaplin film come to life as a circus spectacular.
It’s a fizzy, happy, eclectic and euphoric soundscape (by Raphael Beau) that matched perfectly not only the mood of the packed house that attended Thursday’s show, but also the packed house across the parking lot of the Stampede grounds inside the Saddledome, where the Flames, led by their electrifying 21-year-old rookie, Johnny Goudreau — a.k.a. Johnny Hockey — defeated the defending Stanley Cup Champion Kings to return to the playoffs for the first time in six years.
Can an entire city do a Snoopy dance at the same time? That’s how it felt at moments during Kurios.
Although to be fair to the four dozen artists who perform — and helped create — Kurios, calling what many of them, particularly the show’s talented acrobats, do as a Snoopy dance is a disservice — unless Snoopy suddenly learned how to defy gravity.
An acrobat featured in Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities
Whatever you want to call it, the designers of Kurios have created a vision of a world that’s a visual feast. Walking into the Big Top, you discover an assortment of characters from the show hanging out onstage, dressed like refugees from a 19th century touring magic show if it was created by surrealist Salvador Dali.
There’s an array of imaginative costumes (beautifully designed by Phillippe Guillotel), including one character dressed like an accordion, and Mr. Microcosmos, a jolly roger with a midsection shaped like a 19th century submarine that contains a surprise inside. A beautiful woman in a 19th century dress wears a headdress that’s a gramophone. There’s a lot of carefully articulated moustaches happening.
The set, gorgeously designed by Stephane Roy, evokes filmmaker Terry Gilliam, with a little bit of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea thrown in. The atmosphere suggests that you’re about to enter a world filled with never-before-seen people, places and experiences.
Well — yes and no.
It would be a stretch, particularly, during the first act, to describe Kurios as never-been-seen-before, because hey — we’ve been seeing quite a bit of this stuff for three decades now, at a succession of hit shows from the Cirque.
There’s a Russian acrobat team, an aerial bike act that gives new meaning to the idea of bike culture, and a whimsical routine that envisions what an invisible circus might look like.
Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities presents an upside down bike acrobat routine that gives new meaning to the idea of bike culture.
Then a gigantic, surrealistic hand rolls out, atop of which sit a clutch of contortionists dressed a little like octopus tentacles, who proceed to create a squid pyramid. I don’t know which was more visually arresting — the squid pyramid or Roy’s giant hand.
Cirque du Soleil contortionists in Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities on April 8, 2015.
There’s an upside down dinner party featuring the characters dangling from the roof, that leads to a mesmerizing chair stacking, in which the characters of Kurios manage to turn the most ordinary of household objects — the chair — into a kind of vertical sculpture that produces a pretty spectacular result.
Normally, intermission is just weathering the lineup at the loo, but Thursday night, it also meant a thousand choruses of hockey fans spreading the message that it was “2-1 Flames, 11 minutes to go!”
By the time we all piled back into the big top — the chapiteau — Jari Hudler was netting the game-clincher, just in time for the now-euphoric audience to experience the Acro Net, a gigantic trampoline that propelled various cast members almost all the way to the rooftop of the big top.
It was funny, awesome, and exhilarating — all while quite perfectly capturing the spirit of Calgary’s happiest moment of 2015, and every other year since that magical run to the 2004 Stanley Cup finals.
The Acro Net, part of Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities.
It also set the stage for a second act filled with wonder and humour and imagination, whether delivered from a yo-yo act that conjured up the early days of Cirque as a bunch of Montreal street performers, or a hand puppet performance the audience experiences both live and simultaneously, on a projection screen shaped like a 19th century hot air balloon.
Kurios transforms a big top filled with 3,000 people into a Montreal street corner.
Strip away all the technology, and bells, and whistles — and klezmers and clarinets and theremins — and Kurios manages to turn a big top filled with 3,000 people into an Old Montreal street corner, where a few guys with a hat out tell a story using their fingers.
With dazzling style, a buoyant soundtrack, gorgeous costumes and a collection of gifted performers, there’s only one way to describe Kurios: Cabinet of Curiosities that Flames-crazy Calgary will immediately understand — it’s a Johnny Hockey circus.
shunt@calgaryherald.com
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