Review of Cirque de Soleil's Kurios--Cabinet of Curiosities

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called Kurios--Cabinet of Curiosities. It was written and directed by Michel Laprise. It was about a man who was a mad scientist (Anton Valen) and went to this other world where he met these three shape-based creatures. One of them (Ekaterina Pirogovskaya) had hula hoops of different sizes all around her body. One of them was basically an accordion (Nico Baixas) and one of them (Karl L'Ecuyer) had a little woman living inside his stomach. But it wasn't a fake little woman, it was actually a little woman (Antanina Satsura). It was the best circus I have ever been to. I really loved the show. I felt like it was amazing and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.

I loved the straps act (Stuart McKenzie and Vitali Tomanov) it was really cool. I thought it was so amazing to see these people just flying above you. It looked painless; it looked like an everyday normal day at work for them. I don't think it is actually easy; I think it is actually hard, but they are so used to it. Another cool duo was the Russian Cradle, which was a man and a woman (Roman Tereshchenko and Olena Tereshchenko) and the woman would basically do a trapeze act from the man's arm. He was the human trapeze! She would do these amazing flips and just grab onto his hands again. Both of them have to have good strength with their arms and she also has to have very good trust skills with whoever is catching her.

I thought the Rola Bola act (James Eulises Gonzalez) was really scary and breathtaking. The rola bola are these tubes stacked on top of each other with a platform on the top. Then the person balances on the very very top. After that he rises up in the air on a platform and he does the rola bola up in the air and I just found it so crazy. I thought his aviator costume (designed by Philippe Guillotel) was really really cool. The jacket was see-through, and I liked that. I also really liked the aviator's helmet because it was a steampunk version, turquoise with bronze goggles. Another really fun solo act was one with this woman (Anne Weissbecker) who came in on this bike and was just biking around and then suddenly she flew up into the air. Then she would bike upside down and I thought that was really cool. And she used the bike like a trapeze and she would hang from her knees with her hands down. I thought the Yo-yos act (Tomonari "Black" Ishiguro) was really awesome. I thought when he was a kid he must have just practiced with his yo-yo a lot, never knowing that one day he would be performing in front of thousands of people! I liked when he did the yo-yos so fast that you couldn't even see them and then you could see his fingers just moving like crazy and the yo-yos kept bouncing up and down off his fingers.

The music (by Raphaël Beau and Bob & Bill) was amazing because it was like a Harold Lloyd movie or Triplets of Belleville with a twist of pop music. I'd like to have the soundtrack! Just a little side note: I thought it must have been very hard for the singer to sing basically all the time. I thought that she was great and I thought the band (Antoine Berthiaume, Christopher "Kit" Chatham, Lidia Kaminska, Paul Lazar, Michael Levin, Christa Mercey, and Marc Sohier) must have worked very hard too because they rarely got any breaks and they had to stay on their feet the entire time it seemed.

The contortion act (Ayagma Tsybenova, Lilia Zhambalova, and Bayarma Zodboeva) was crazy. When you saw them, you felt like your back was breaking! They made it look extra cool because of their costumes which looked kind of like lizards of some sort, so it looked like a bunch of lizards crawling on each other. They did these crazy tricks where they bent their leg all the way over to their heads and were still smiling!

Upside Down World (Andrii Bondarenko) was this terrifyingly awesome thing where there was a man stacking chairs on top of each other to get to the ceiling. About halfway through the same thing started happening on the ceiling with a person who basically looked the same as him. It was so cool because he was just being supported by chairs only and it is very very suspenseful. And the upside down person had to be hooked in so it might not have been as scary for him, but then he was also upside down!

I felt like both of the group acts were amazing. They had so many people doing so many awesome things. In the Baquine act (Nikolay Astashkin, Ekaterina Evdokimova, Roman Kenzhayev, Elena Kolesnikova, Sergey Kudryavtsev, Andrey Nikitin, Serguei Okhai, Dimitri Parmenov, Roman Polishchuk, Alexey Puzyryov, Alexey Starodubtsev, and Igor Strizhanov) there were these people dressed in hats with pompoms on top and they do these tricks where they are stacked on top of each other like 6 people high and they would jump over each other and land in the other person's arms. That was impressive because they had to have so much consistency so that they could land in the same place every time. And I thought what they did was so amazing and I admire that they can do something so brave. I thought the Acro Net act (Arnaud Caizergues, Victor Degtyarev, Nathan Dennis, Mathieu Hubener, Jack Helme, L'Ecuyer, and Ryan Shinji Murray) act was mind-blowing, how they could jump so high on a net. It looked like they were swimming and flying and diving at the same time. It would mess up the entire act if you jumped too early or jumped too late. They jumped right on time because that is what you have to do in an act like that. My favorite part was when they would put their hands down from the ladder that hung from the top of the tent and they would grab the person who jumped up as high as the ladder by the hand. The costumes were really great too. They looked like sea monkeys!

People who would like this show are people who like amazing circus acts, steampunk pop music, and jumping sea monkeys. I think people should definitely definitely go see this show. I thought that it was so awesome because it actually tells a story instead of just doing the tricks. I loved it!

Photos: Martin Girard