For twenty-five years, Cirque du Soleil has revolutionized the face of circus, replacing elephants and sawdust with dizzying confections of music, story, and seemingly impossible feats of acrobatic mastery on the ground and in the air. Now they're taking their magic to the water with "O" at the Bellagio. A celebration both of infinity and the lifeblood of the planet, "O" redefines the whole idea of spectacle by plunging it into one and a half million gallons of water.
Like so many things that begin small and spiral into chaos, the show begins with a drip. Into an aisle, with audience members moving through it to take their seats. Two clowns come out to fix it, ineffectually. It's just the beginning of many entrances and exits through the audience, as the boy Guifà is lured by the doll-like Aurora into a dark forest. In pursuing her, he meets a cast of surreal characters, from the loyal barrel organ grinder and the brave Comets to a man wielding two bullwhips in a complex, snapping dance and the menacing maestro Eugen, who undergoes his own transformation over the course of the show.
This aquatic spectacle shows the role water plays in human (and animal) life. We're taken to different wet places (an African wadi, a house submerged to just below the roofline, and, oddly, the moon) and introduced to characters with different relationships to water: divers in old-fashioned suits washed up on the shore, a raucous wedding party in old-fashioned bathing suits, playing zebras.
Many of Cirque's trademark acts are here: fire dancers, seemingly boneless contortionists, different kinds of aerial routines on trapeze and other sorts of rigging. But how often do you see aerialists performing their dismounts by dropping from their swinging ropes and perches sixty feet into the water? And the more traditional diving is spectacular and often funny: there are cliff divers and Olympic divers doing their amazing corkscrews and somersaults, but there are also people making goofy or elegant shapes with their bodies in mid-air, as though clowning for the camera.
One act that stays at sea level is the banquine, a group of acrobats who throw themselves and each other through the air without the use of any props. There are no springboards, no trapeze, just powerful performers launching themselves off each other's bodies into mid-air splits and flips, sometimes crossing paths by a hair's breadth. This time the banquine act is called the Barge, taking place on something like a giant pink kickboard, with a group of women in subtly fluorescent pink and green bodysuits raising the stakes by performing their amazing tricks from a wet surface.
The whole show glories in the absurd: lunar landings, phones ringing, carousel horses that fly through the forest. Characters and objects appear without explanation and disappear as quickly. The clowns in their sailor suits attempt to prepare for sleep on the roof of the partially-submerged house, a red-clad madwoman dances out of a coffin, and a giant round mirror descends from the ceiling to provide an intriguing added perspective on a glorious show set to live music that celebrates water and the cycles of life, love, death, and rebirth in true Cirque style.
