Cirque du So-Lame

So The Wife and I had both always wanted to see Cirque du Soleil, but neither of us ever had.  Cue the temptress that is "Groupon," offering her amazing deals on random services & events.  A discount of 30% off was enough to sway us to roll the dice on Cirque du Soleil "Totem" and attend a Friday night show.

We were both pretty excited.  The show started out with some great gymnastics, (Author's note: gymnastics will not be a common theme in this blog, despite the fact that it has been discussed in two consecutive posts - honestly it may never be discussed again) with performers dressed in lizard costumes doing flips, bar exercises and other cool stuff.  I started wondering "Who are these people?  Do former Olympic gymnasts end up in Cirque du Soleil, with a bitter attitude stemming from their painful fall from grace, like Chazz Michael Michaels from Blades of Glory?  Will Gabby Douglas & Aly Raisman be leading the 2015 Cirque cast?

Flying lizard gymnasts

Enter the next group of performers: four Asian girls on unicycles with bowls stacked on their heads.  Now this is right in my wheelhouse because A. I love Asians and B. I love unicycles.  (Just kidding, I don't love unicycles, I prefer my cycles with two wheels).  This was amazing...while riding very tall unicycles, these girls kicked bowls across mid-air and they landed in stacks on each other's heads...it was unreal. 

Unicycling Asian Girls

So far I'm loving this, just amazing stuff going on...I'm dropping audible "WOWs" every 3-5 minutes...then things took a turn for the worse.  The show shifts gears and we get a couple of segments of dramatic stage performance that attempt to be funny.  I don't find this cheesy stuff funny at all.  "Woah woah woah" I said to The Wife, "I hate this kind of stuff...this is not what I signed up for."  She shot me one of those "shut up and stop embarrasing me glances."  Point taken.  So Intermission comes next and the show limps into the locker room at half-time.  During the break, I continued to complain "they better cut the $hit with all the boring stage performance - I came here to see incredible physical feats!"

I ruined Cirqu du Soleil & I'm not remotely funny

Back to the show: next we have a male/female duo with both performers wearing old school roller-skates.  "This could be good," I thought..and it was.  The male performer was a tall, exotic looking fellow with long braided hair - I assumed his name was Antonio.  The female performer was very beautiful and exotic as well - I call her "Pocahontas."  Their performance was very sensual, almost to the point of downright erotic.  I whispered to the wife: "you know these guys have definitely banged," which caused her to burst into laughter because she was thinking the exact same thing.

Antonio & Pocahontas precoital.

But just when things seemed to be getting back on-track, those same dorky stage performers trotted out onto the stage with their thoughtless, easy jokes that appeal to the masses.  This continued for what seemed like an eternity and I was getting aggravated.  The last few performances were mediocre at best.  I'm not trying to be unreasonable, but there were some "fumbles" and "mistakes" in the last few performances...I saw Blue Man Group & they NEVER messed up.  But I digress.  All in all, it was an enjoyable show that did not meet my lofty expectations.  Some of the performances were amazing...others seemed like glorified street performers.

Judges score: 6.7/10