NYC Theater Review: 'Zarkana' by Cirque du Soleil

"Zarkana" by Cirque du Soleil is a tantalizing, funny, and physically thrilling show that your kids will love just as much as you do.

A Tuesday afternoon, early summer 2012. I am standing in Radio City Music Hall flanked by acres of deep peach-colored seats—empty except for the occasional staffer passing through, absorbed in busy. Before me on the cavernous stage are a handful of the world’s most skilled athletic performers—fearless, but not flawless; this is a rehearsal, after all.

Upstage—on and around a ginormous spiderweb of a set—a handful of trapeze artists do their swing thing; downstage, a cluster of young guys with muscles for days toss and wave massive banners, stopping every so often for a sidebar with choreographer-trainer Masha Choodu (the show’s resident juggler). And when these super-beings are not airborne or exchanging flags, they are stretching, experimenting, creating.

In my role as privileged interloper with notepad, I feel miniscule…smaller than small in this vast iconic theater for which Cirque du Soleil’s Zarkana was created. And then someone hands me a program containing the intro:

“Locked in time—within the walls of an abandoned theatre—a dormant world springs to life.”

And so it does, in so many fabulous ways.

The Music

Unlike any other Cirque du Soleil production to date, the music in Zarkana is not merely atmospheric. Rather, it’s a rock opera score from composer/musical director Nick Littlemore. Musician Jacubu Griffin (drums) notes, “Compared to Cirque’s other shows this one has a different feel…more contemporary but with elements of nostalgic classic rock.”

“And more techno,” Griffin continues. “Nick marries techno with retro. And there are other elements—different eras, different genres. So in the end what you get is something unlike anything you’ve heard before.”

Griffin observes that while most of the cast comes from various parts of Russia, Europe, and China, the musicians are American and totally in love with the freedom Cirque allows them at each performance. “For one thing, the cast changes with injuries so we have to adapt to new people quite often,” he says. And one can only assume, despite rigorous training, minor injuries must be fairly commonplace in a show filled with contortionists, aerial acts, and a little something called The Wheel of Death.

As for the female and male lead singers, Meetu Chiliana and Paul Bisson (Zark) are everything you could possibly ask for in vocal power and expressiveness.

The show's trapeze act is a given crowd-pleaser

The Artists

Because Zarkana follows a dashing red-cloaked magician (Zark) who has lost the woman he loves in a seemingly empty theater, the characters he encounters in his quest to find her run the gamut from hysterically funny to mysterious to physically confounding.

Those first to appear in the arc of the storyline arrive pre-show: a cadre of eccentric, white-clad clowns sporting names like Mardi Gras, Rag Doll, Ti-Boss, and Kite. They flood the audience with the sort of disarming energy that outgoing little kids embrace, no questions asked, while shy ones bury their heads in their parents’ shoulders, venturing frequent peeks at these fascinating creatures.

Popping up at various points throughout the show, these characters are led by two outstanding clowns of the Russian school of buffoonery (if you’re familiar with Slava’s Snow Show, you’ll be right on target), only they’re played by a couple of loopy Yanks: Daniel Passer and Wayne Wilson.

The acts themselves are, as always, eclectically awesome, meaning that when it comes down to a persnickety family dynamic, everyone in your party should find something to love. Trapeze and tightrope acts are given crowd-pleasers, and only here are they met with competition from the teams of Carole Demers and her partners Yuri Kreer and Johnny Gasser on the Russian Bars, and Dmitry Dvoreyskiy and Victoria Dvoretskaya’s ladder act.

As for the biggest applause generators in this particular daredevil universe, the two-man Wheel of Death—resembling a seriously scary amusement park ride—becomes gasp-inducing beyond words when manipulated by Junior Delgado and Carlos Martin; while Anatoly Zalevskiy’s seemingly straightforward “hand-balancing” is so much more when you consider his skeleton is most likely made of rubber.