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Wednesday, 8:57 am in Entertainment

Hah!  I rule!

So last night ~Mat [h] and I finally got to use our $250 VIP tickets to see Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai.  I bought them as a birthday present last year, and they’ve been sitting around ever since, taunting us with their being there’dness.  So anyway at about 7:00pm we rocked up to the big blue and yellow tent set up outside the National Library/Questacon, parked in our special parking, received our special show bags and passes, and got ushered into our special Tapis Rouge tent.  It was the poshest tent I’ve ever been in; it had carpet and red faux velvet blow-up lounges.  Super-polite waiters whizzed around carrying trays of champaign and very tiny, very posh steak and mash dinners.  Weird plinth things were covered in hors d’oeuvres.  Oh, and one ‘wall’ (it was a round tent) contained a gift shop.  Can’t forget the gift shop.  Anyway, we hung around in there for about an hour giggling at the blow-up mattresses backlit with coloured lights that decorated the walls and stealing space on the lounges and barstools from all the other young yuppies.  I was actually kinda surprised how many kids there were in the VIP tent (kids tickets were $125); there was one family with two adults and three children, which is a whopping $825.  They were all very uniformly well-behaved kids, though.

Eventually a big voice from the sky announced that the show was starting, so the ushers came and took us in through Special Door #4 with “no stairs and no lines”.  ~Mat [h] and I were literally in the front row, just a little bit right of centre.  This sounds really good until you actually get there and realise that the seats are really close to the stage, and there’s quite a lot of looking up.

The show itself was super-awesome.  I’m not going to try and describe it because I’m not going to be able to do it justice; go buy yourself some tickets or download/buy a DVD copy of it or something.  My favourite guys were the ones who flew about on the long bungee ropes, especially after they came out the second time wearing their tres-Loki horned-god headpieces.  Being so close to the performers you could see which acts were the most physically and mentally stressful; there was one particular act which involved four ladies on a trapeze-like structure.  Two big burly dudes came out an stood underneath them; they didn’t actually ever do anything, but were obviously the ‘catchers’ should someone fall.  There was one particular bit where they turned sideways to the audience and the one on our right seemed extremely nervous; he kept his arms half-out constantly to the point where I wondered if someone had fallen recently during that bit.  The funny thing was, during that time the women didn’t look like they were doing anything that was particularly more dangerous than any other thing they’d been doing… not that I know a lot about what’s ‘dangerous’ or not as far as trapeze-acts go I guess.

Front row meant you could also hear the performers doing their countdowns; when the three little kids came out with their bolas I got a quick lesson in how to count in Chinese.

At intermission time we got to go back into our Special Tent, use our Special Toilets (~Mat [h]: “They’re still site toilets, but of the nicer variety.”) and eat the little tiny desserts that had appeared on the now differently-decorated plinth things.  I had some champaign jelly and a little mousse in a chocolate cup.  ~Mat [h] had a mousse and another ‘expresso’ mousse with a chocolate spoon.  Go chocolate spoon.

That was pretty much it, really.  Oh, except for the clowns.  There were kind of two sets of clowns; two who were part of the ‘story’ and two who weren’t (fair warning: they’re dressed as ushers at the start of the show, the woman is easy to pick, the man less so).  I was pleased to note that the clowns were actually really funny, which just goes to show that body comedy is not dead and thank gods for that. (For those who’ve never seen a CdS performance, very little of it is in English, or in fact any intelligible language as far as I could tell.)

So, yeah.  Amazingly amazing; y’all should make it your mission in life to see as many CdS shows as humanly possible.  Super-fit people wearing very little clothing (well, really a lot of clothing that leaves very little to the imagination) performing extraordinary acts of athletic skill… plus the amazing costuming and music… funny clowns… what’s not to like?

• Tags » cirque du soleil, life, live performances