Saltimbanco
Most adults have memories of the circus featuring acrobats, trapeze artists and clowns. Cirque Du Soleil attempts to make this old fashioned entertainment an art form. Saltimbanco has been seen by 6.7 million people worldwide. On the night I attended, the excited audience seemed ready to embrace the show but, unfortunately, by the end, many were underwhelmed.
Following some overlong audience participation involving a group of irritating clowns, complete with garish costumes and long noses, the show begins to literally take flight. A group of acrobats scale Chinese poles in the centre of the stage, leaving the audience open mouthed at their spider-like movement.
Then, guess what? They send in the clowns again. Unfunny sketches involving incomprehensible gobbledegook in place of dialogue leave a few younger members of the audience giggling but annoy everyone else.
Micheal Crete‘s set adds depth to the show within a glorious circus tent but it cannot, unfortunately, disguise the awful music. Rene Dupere fuses Euro pop (or should that be Euro pap!) with a Celine Dion-style vocal which is more like music from the Eurovision Song Contest than a soundtrack for jumping jacks.
Two female trapeze artists almost save Saltimbanco from becoming an overblown mess. They swing over the packed audience, leaving spectators gasping. Ok, they have harnesses on, but for people sat below them, this is quite a relief! White latex-clad bungee jumpers resembling aliens from Star Trek also thrill as they bounce up and down, hitting the rafters.
But there’s no theatrical glue to prevent the show from breaking apart at the seams. Much of the humour is clumsy and slows the pace until something better comes along. All in all, it’s about 45 minutes of good useable material, paraded as a two-hour spectacle, with a 30-minute merchandising opportunity – I mean interval. As some seats cost £39.50 each, this is simply not good value for money.
A child sat near me clambered towards the stage during one of the many encores, only to be grabbed by his mother. She said: “There’s nothing much worth seeing.” I’m almost in complete agreement.
– Glenn Meads
NOTE: The following THREE-STAR review dates from January 2003 and this production’s earlier London season at the Royal Albert Hall.
There may be nothing quite like Cirque du Soleil, but at the same time their shows are actually all alike. The result is that the more you see of them, the less there is to see.
This uncomfortable realisation hit me while watching the return of Saltimbanco to London, last seen at the Royal Albert Hall in 1997 and now back there as part of another tour of the longest running show in their repertoire. (There are some 13 Cirque productions now playing around the world, and this one has been on the road since 1992, playing to over 5.5million people so far).
I have loved the work of this Canadian-based human circus super-troupers for many years now, applauding their remarkable fusion of the human skills of circus gymnasts, acrobats and aerialists with the theatrical packaging of a lavishly produced big-budget musical, but I’m beginning to grow suspicious.
Is this, I wonder, a triumph of packaging over (lack of) content and am I being duped? Certainly, Saltimbanco contains a lot of padding: between the choreography and the clowns – and in particular one, Jesko Von Den Steinen, whose name is the funniest thing about him as he endlessly reproduces sound effects to accompany his mimed shoot-outs and ball catching – the acts themselves seem marginalised. And in a long evening, it’s amazing to do a count and discover that there are, in fact, only nine acts in all.
Several of these are high-wire, like the delicate Oriental girl (Wang Jingmin) who dances effortlessly between two parallel tightropes and rides a unicycle on one of them, or the duo trapeze (Ruslana and Taisiya Bazaliy) who perform a beautiful aerial ballet with each other. But neither of these express real danger, as you can make out the attached safety harnesses all too clearly. Ditto a Russian Swing act from which the participants are propelled into the air from a giant swing and build themselves into pyramids. A harness meant that, on the first night, a misjudged jump flew the jumper safely over the shoulders of the person he was supposed to land upon.
Still, when Cirque works at its simplest, it is at its most impressive. A juggling girl (Maria Markova) who ends up manipulating eight balls simultaneously is thrilling. So are two men (Andrewzej Piechota and Tomasz Wiezien) who offer a beautifully integrated display of balancing on each other that is breathtaking in its chemistry and tension.
There remains much to enjoy about Saltimbanco. But at a top price ticket of £49.50 that exceeds, by far, that for most West End shows, there needs to be more of this kind of human interaction to justify the expenditure.
