'Cirque Dreams,' Over the Big Top
By Celia Wren
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, September 13, 2007
In the old days, circuses could be seedy affairs, peopled by roustabouts and greasepainted ringmasters and clowns in standard-issue frizzy wigs. These days, visit a circus -- sorry, I meant a cirque -- and more likely than not, you'd swear it had a technical budget akin to a Disney theme park's and art direction by Salvador Dali.
So it is with "Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy," the genial but overproduced family-friendly extravaganza running at the Warner Theatre through Sunday. It's not enough for creator-director Neil Goldberg to assemble a team of extraordinarily competent acrobats, contortionists, jugglers and the like; he also needs to plunge them into a fevered dreamscape that suggests "The Lion King" on magic mushrooms.
Iridescent lighting washes over performers who are in stylized animal costumes, accomplishing feats of balance and coordination between two looming baobab trees. Leopardlike figures execute floor-level break-dancing moves while evading whirling jump-ropes. A googly-eyed simian shape in a poison-green frock coat (Ruslan Dmytruk) bounces multiple balls while enormous frogs croak around him. Two men in giraffe-hued garb (Vladimir Dovgan and Anatoliy Yeniy) balance precariously on shelves stacked atop a rolling pipe -- a truly breathtaking stunt. Through it all, the sound system blares impersonal, relentlessly pulsating disco music that occasionally incorporates a global-village sound -- a hint of Tibetan chanting, the keening of a vaguely Slavic violin.
The mood becomes even more phantasmagorical in Act 2, in which the light dims, giving scope to glow-in-the-dark costumes, including the lurid plumage of some peacocks. The jungle of "Jungle Fantasy" is evidently a region of stunning biodiversity: Rubbing shoulders with the aforementioned animals are a unicorn (Naomi Sampson), a couple of emus (Zachary Carroll and Sergey Zamotin), a clan of lizards (Uranmandakh Amarsanaa, Buyankhishig Ganbaatar and Odgerel Oyunbaatar), and some insects who have fine-tuned Bob Fosse-style moves. Various indeterminate fauna flaunt eerie masklike heads that make them look like dancers in a carnival or a tribal ceremony.
One of the critters is extremely annoying: It's the Lady Bug Vocalist (Julia Langley), an emceelike figure who bears a disturbing resemblance to Britney Spears. She slinks onstage every now and again, clad in a red sequined gown, to sing bad pop tunes and share not-very-audible commentary about her ecosystem. Now and then she leers at a towering, shirtless hunk whom the program terms the Soul Tree Violinist (Jared Burnett); if it were not for his white lipstick and electric fiddle, this guy would be the spitting image of a Harlequin romance cover model.
When aerialists are not cavorting on swaths of dangling fabric, or wizards of dexterity wrangling huge spinning hoops and metal frames, there are moments of G-rated comedy. Jesters in pink suits make fun of audience members. A emu pushes a baby stroller. The performers -- many of whom hail from Mongolia, Russia and Ukraine -- exhibit the same aplomb whether clowning or defying gravity. Their exploits are calculated to charm and amaze, and the show is largely charming and amazing -- but those qualities are dwarfed by the ostentatious production values.
For the record, this Broadway-meets-the-big-top venture is not affiliated with the unstoppable Cirque du Soleil. In fact, according to a gleeful release distributed with publicity materials, Goldberg's team waged a prolonged, ultimately successful legal battle against that Quebec-birthed empire, which had claimed trademark status for the word "cirque" (which means "circus" in French). A federal court disagreed: The pretentious-circus movement, it ruled, is for tout le monde.
