61. CIRQUE DE SOLEIL: QUIDAM
I took
my 19-year-old granddaughter to this touring production of the Cirque de Soleil’s
QUIDAM, which premiered in 1996, and is the ninth show in the Cirque’s
remarkable history. It would have been nice if we had been able to fly through
the air on ropes, rings, or draperies while searching for the appropriate “will
call” desk to pick up our press tickets at Brooklyn’s gigantic Barclays Center,
and to have leapt, cartwheeled, or flipped over the ubiquitous security guards
searching bags and scanning bodies with wands. My granddaughter had never seen a Cirque de Soleil show before; a
college cheerleader, she was delighted with the show’s often astonishing
acrobatics, and had a thoroughly good time. I had some reservations.
If you’ve ever seen a Cirque show,
you’ll know what to expect in QUIDAM. Eerie, Middle Eastern-sounding music with
lyrics in a mysterious, made-up language; incredible sound and lighting effects,
with smoke machines going full blast; a series of superb acrobatic acts,
including eye-popping aerial stunts and balancing routines, all of them
displaying not only the unbelievable things the human body is capable of, but doing
so with atmospherics designed to enhance the sheer beauty of the human
form. There are, of course, oddball clowns and even a theme that presumably
ties everything together, but I doubt that anyone really pays much attention to
these elements, which serve merely to provide a thin veneer of context to the
sequence of awesome presentations. For an overview of the kind of themes and
acts involved, I suggest you check the Wikipedia entry on the show: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quidam
Unlike Cirque's recent TOTEM, seen in a
tent erected on the Citi Field grounds this spring, QUIDAM is being presented
in huge arenas, like Barclays Center, and the show--at least at this venue--is less effective as a
result. Our seats were pretty good, or would have been for a Nets game, but the
stage seemed to be in a galaxy far, far away, with the faces of the performers
indistinguishable from one another. Often, we were unable to tell who was male
and who female. The vast space of the arena tends to depersonalize the
performances when you can’t see the performers’ expressions. At TOTEM, performers roamed the aisles at certain moments. Not so here. Binoculars would
be a useful item to bring along if you’re going, even if you think you’ll be
fairly close.
The technical effects and costumes are less
spectacular than those in TOTEM, which had particularly remarkable projections
that remain embedded in my memory. There’s a very funny sketch toward the end
during which three spectators are pulled from the audience to participate, hilariously,
in the making of a silent movie set in a Wild West saloon. This seems to be a
standard routine, however, since it also is used in OLD HATS, the Bill Irwin-David
Shiner comic revue recently at the Signature Theatre. I don’t know who
originated it, but its originality can certainly be questioned.
I’m not a basketball fan so it’s unlikely I would ever
have visited Barclays Center were it not for a show like QUIDAM, even though
this super-arena sits in a part of downtown Brooklyn very familiar to me from
my childhood. (The huge box stores across the street on Atlantic Avenue used to
be the locale of a major wholesale meat market where my father purchased goods
for his butcher shop in the 1950s.) As this show demonstrates, however, filling
so huge a space with a non-sporting event is a daunting challenge; even with
large sections closed off, there still were many empty seats. I’m probably more
grateful for the opportunity to have seen the place than to have seen QUIDAM,
but my granddaughter was more excited about the show. After all, she’d already seen
two basketball games at Barclays.