Cirque du Soleil
Rach and I just got back from my first Cirque du Soleil viewing. It was OK. I was kind of expecting to be blown away by most of it but not so much. The clowns were dumb. Juggling seemed silly. Who comes up with the juggling acts? It’s like they go “OK, I can juggle 5 balls at once” and someone comes up with the bright idea “But can you juggle 5 balls at once while balancing a 10 foot pole on your forehead?” The contortionists were alright but I had seen most of the stuff they did from Cirque du Soleil videos that Dustin showed me. They also had a couple of gymnastic acts which were OK as well. Rachel liked when the people got on a single stilt and were launched in the air. They had a short act where some guy did a bunch of sleight of hand tricks on a volunteer. I had just watched a video about Teller (from Penn and Teller) where he talks about sleight of hand stuff and it was really just the same thing.
My favorite parts were where there was a chance of injury. All of the acts but the tight rope walking had safety cords. So that immediately makes the tight rope walking the best they had. What made it even better was the one stunt where one guy jumps over the other on the tight rope and then fell. He caught the rope with his hands when he fell so he didn’t actually get hurt. It probably wasn’t a stunt to get more applause but after this happened everyone sure clapped a lot for the tight rope walkers. You would think they would clap less since the guy messed up. The crowd liked to give standing ovations to pretty much every act which I found odd. You have to save standing o’s for when they really deserve them.
There was another act where 2 big circles spun around with a guy in each of them. They did tricks inside the circles for a bit and then eventually did tricks outside of the circles. Pretty cool. The last act we saw had this almost naked guy (Rach looked at his bum) climb on a chair and do all these arm stands. After doing a couple moves he would stack couple chairs and do some more stances. I would say the only point of going higher would be a higher chance of injury/death but as soon as he got 5+ chairs he had a safety cord on.
So will I goto cirque again? Sure. Would I prefer watching the videos at home instead of paying $50+/seat? Yes.