When you come down to it, there’s only a limited number of circus skills. You can throw, spin, balance, bounce, hang, fly, catch, contort, somersault, or clown. Your average show is pretty much guaranteed to feature somebody juggling pins, walking a wire, flying off a teeterboard, swinging from a height, touching toes to head, or doing a handstand atop either another person or a swaying stack of chairs or both.
This worked supremely well for a long time. But the ratio of eye candy to real expertise seemed to skew in the more recent shows that toured to Chicago. It looked more and more like the Cirque formula had devolved to the point where cast members were simply buckled into their harnesses and plugged into whatever elaborate conceit the creatives had conjured for us. The narratives weren’t played out so much as populated. The beautiful young performers were interchangeable.
But the marvels overwhelm the doldrums—and the design is eccentrically, exquisitely anachronistic in the spirit of movies ranging from Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! to most anything by Terry Gilliam, but especially The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. More important, Kurios puts human beings back at the center of the circus, which is where they belong. Because if it isn’t humans doing the defying (of death, of gravity, of our usual bungling lack of grace), then who cares? v
Through 9/20: Tue-Thu 8 PM, Fri-Sat 4:30 and 8 PM, Sun 1:30 and 5 PM United Center parking lot 1901 W. Madison 877-924-7783cirquedusoleil.com $35-$145
