"At Cirque du Soleil no one is more depressed than the clowns."

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Or so says the New York Times.  A mere five days after a lengthy profile of Cirque du Soleil co-founder and owner Guy Laliberté, which I wrote about in this post, the Times is back with a three-page preview of Cirque's upcoming debut at Radio City Music Hall, the stage show Zarkana.  And though their previews tend to be fluff pieces, the Times is again raising questions about the Cirque's artistic direction, comparing Zarkana to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and wondering out loud about the caliber of the theatre and clowning components.

Here are a few quotes:

In an effort to rebound from the rare failure of the intimate “Banana Shpeel” in New York last year, the one thing everyone agrees on is that this will be a very big show. There will be daredevil feats, bold images and high-flying acrobatic spectacle. As Mr. Girard put it: “No theater. No vaudeville. We want to be more Cirque than Cirque.”

Mr. Bazinet’s job is to help guide 15 performers of diverse backgrounds into a comic unit called the Movers. Less than a week earlier he had spoken to his friend David Shiner, the director of “Banana Shpeel,” who told him what he already knew: that clowning at a theater the size of Radio City is impossible. “The clowns are going to die,” Mr. Shiner says. “You need an intimate space for clowning, otherwise you have nothing.”

At Cirque du Soleil no one is more depressed than the clowns. That’s not just because the painted smiles hide a deep-seated sadness, although there is some truth to that stereotype. (“You can’t imagine the number of clowns I’ve seen cry in my life,” Mr. Laliberté says.) Rather, it is because developing a clown act requires more experimentation and spontaneity than the Machine allows time for. And Cirque was built on arty, sometimes twee clowning that can’t fill up a large space like Radio City.

[Okay, I admit it, I thought "twee" was a typo, but it turns out it means "excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental." —jt]

The story is, if anything, more impenetrable. When asked about it, Mr. Girard answers abruptly, Cirque “is not a good place to tell a story, period.”

You can read the whole article here.

And here's a video preview that'll give you some idea of the look of the show; there are more on YouTube.

NY Times: Defiant Showman Demands His ‘Wow’

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Guy Laliberté, co-founder and owner of Cirque du Soleil, has done well enough for himself to afford to pay $35 million to be a space tourist. Yes, you read that right; yes, out of his own pocket. Not bad for someone who started as an accordion-playing street performer!

With his latest show, Zarkana, preparing to open in New York at Radio City Music Hall, he and the Cirque are the subject of an interesting enough NY Times profile.

Because the Cirque's Banana Shpeel, an attempt at a vaudeville stage show, bombed so badly in Chicago and New York, there's been considerably more criticism of their artistry, and a lot of pressure on them to bounce back with their next show.  The article does tackle this head-on:

As Cirque has transformed from an arty alternative to traditional big-top circus into what it is today, some suggest it has become emotionally cold and risk-averse. “If Cirque is going to succeed in New York, they need to understand story — and they don’t,” said Richard Crawford, an actor currently in “War Horse” who was fired from “Banana Shpeel” last year. “They have no idea about Aristotelean plotting or character. It’s not in their heart. They come from street performers, and now they are street performance with laser beams and millions of dollars.”

The problem is that audiences have come to expect a certain scale from Cirque, and when they don’t get it, as in the case of “Shpeel,” they may be disappointed. It’s a nagging worry for Mr. Laliberté too. “Are we condemned to only doing big acrobatic shows?” he says, leaning forward with a grave look. “Creatively we have the capacity to do much more. The answer is we can explore new stuff, but we need to give the public a bone to chew on.”

You can read the whole article here.