Mike Weatherford of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has seen the new ZARKANA… here are his thoughts!
Without doubt, the new version is better than the middling one that landed at Aria in the fall of 2012, after its second summer at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. By then, “Zarkana” already had shed English-language songs and most of the story about a magician who revives the ghosts of an abandoned theater in a bid to reunite with his lost love. Now, even the magician is gone. It’s up to two clowns (Gabe del Vecchio and Stas Bogdanov) to awaken the theater’s ghostly “Movers,” as the “spirits of the theater” are known in the official synopsis.
I kind of liked movie and opera director Francois Girard’s atypically quiet, moody opening when the theater slowly stirred to life. The comparative jump-start is at least a trade-off. It gets the show quickly out of the gate and allows a whole new act to be squeezed into the same running time.
That would be the “aerial strap” duo Kevin and Andrew Atherton, identical twins who soar out beyond the curtain line of the proscenium stage, which often makes the action (as it did with “Elvis”) appear more distant than the Cirques with thrust stages.
More subliminal changes include punchier music from composer Nick Littlemore, who replaced much of his cinematic underscore. The rest of “Zarkana” relies upon the strength of the individual acts, since most of the transitions are gone. The two clowns are called upon to cover changes behind the curtain at least twice more than their two sketches with props.
There is no longer any attempt to explain why singer Cassiopee shows up as a snake or spider lady, since they are no longer out to jealously thwart the magician. Now she’s just part of the cool production design framing the flying trapeze or, in the case of the snake lady, high-wire artists Pedro Carillo and Luis Acosta. These crazy guys manage to jump rope, or over one another, while dodging a pendulum of fire.
With the focus on acrobatics, we find plenty to amaze us and power us past a couple of acts that don’t. If we’ve seen this act in “Ka,” or the trapeze act in “Mystere” and U.S. circuses, it circles back to the only real drawback of “Zarkana.” That familiarity, or at least the lack of a strong point of departure.
One striking moment seems to have survived all three versions: Andrey Kolotenko’s expressive hand-balancing centered between two grand pianos in duet. It’s hypnotic, the very definition of how Cirque blends art and athleticism.
{ SOURCE: Las Vegas Review-Journal | http://goo.gl/WsjhuI }
