Cirque du Soleil Paramour

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Ongoing	Every Sun, 2pm, 7pm; Mon-Tue, Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sat, 8pm

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Paramour’s idea of the Broadway musical is particularly disturbing, evincing as it does only the skimpiest knowledge of the form. If we broadly describe a musical as an entertainment that offers a story about characters through song, we have already raised the bar too high. What Paramour offers is more of a series of clichés about humanoids accompanied by sounds. The main cliché is the one that glorifies Old Timey Hollywood as a land of tragic romance and glittering sophistication. (“Welcome to the Golden Age / Tux and tales [sic] it’s all the rage,” the opening number helpfully explains.) The main humanoids are AJ Golden, Hollywood’s greatest director, who has “the world upon a string,” as another apparently mistranslated lyric has it, and the starlet he loves, who despite being a redhead is named Indigo James. But Indigo, if only she knew it, is in love with the young composer Joey Green (no relation), who must write a love song for the movie in which Golden will introduce Indigo to the world. Even were I not dazzled by the symbolism of these color names, I couldn’t continue with the plot description because, in its idiocy, it defies encapsulation. I will only say that what comes out of the characters’ mouths is not even as interesting as what almost came out of mine while watching them.

From Vegas circus shows we get the usual daring acts and awesome tackiness. The daring acts — including teeterboard, cyr wheel, juggling, trampoline, strap work, hand-to-hand, and an apparent homage to twin incest — are performed with evident skill. For Cirque fans there are too few of them. For the rest of us, the problem is that with only one exception they have nothing to do with the “narrative.” Repeatedly in my notes I wrote, “What is going on?” — for instance, when acrobats got involved in a number about Calamity Jane, or when a chorus of zombies performed Chinese pole tricks. Another time, for reasons I could not fathom, eight or nine fringed lampshades lifted off of their lamps and did an aerial dance, like drunken medusa jellyfishes. (They were drone-controlled, so at least that was cool.) The one circus bit that successfully commented on the action was a hand-to-trapeze trio in which a woman was passed back and forth between two men as the three non-acrobat leads sang a song called “Love Triangle.” This rose briefly to the level of sensible banality.

But it did not suggest larger applications; I do not anticipate a funambulist revival of A Little Night Music no matter how apt the image. Some things just don’t belong together, and you’d think that Cirque, having failed so miserably with New York productions of Banana Shpeel and Zarkana to force this unwanted conjugation, would by now have understood that, or at least have chosen better models and hired a team familiar with the workings of real musicals. It’s an especially arrogant form of carpetbaggery to think that, with enough money, you can do anything. Paramour was capitalized at around $25 million. That’s twice the cost of Hamilton, which admittedly does not include even one drone-controlled lampshade. That must be its problem.

Showtimes may vary, check website for clarity — Jesse Green