Delirium

The new Cirque du Soleil show, Delir­ium, is in town.  Four of us went to last night’s show …wow.  This is the third Cirque show I’ve seen, and I still can’t find words to describe them.  In talk­ing about it after­wards (well, not so much talk­ing as star­ing slack-jawed at each other) we all agreed:  You can’t explain one of these shows to some­one who’s never seen one, you have to expe­ri­ence it your­self.

What I can say is it’s very dif­fer­ent from what you’d expect from a “typ­i­cal” Cirque show.  The other’s I’ve seen (Ale­gria and Cor­teo) were more “circus-y” with pos­i­tively unreal acts of phys­i­cal coor­di­na­tion, dex­ter­ity, and team­work, all per­formed to a bed of orig­i­nal music.  Delir­ium is (for lack of a bet­ter descrip­tion) the exact oppo­site.  It’s more a con­cert than a cir­cus, where the music takes cen­ter stage and the cir­cus acts (lesser in num­ber, but not in inten­sity) aug­ment the songs.  Truly outstanding.

This is a short-run show (only 2 nights) in cities across the US and Canada, and it’s open­ing up in more and more of them.  I know I’ve said it before, I’m going to say it again, and I’ll say it after every Cirque show I see:

Go … now.