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written and directed by James Hadley

Cirque du Soleil & TO Live, Meridian Hall, 1 Front Street East, Toronto

December 12, 2024-January 3, 2025

“Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”

For the first time Cirque du Soleil has brought its Christmas-themed show ’Twas the Night Before… to Toronto. Theoretically, a Christmas-themed circus show would be a great addition to the other seasonal offerings that always appear in December from Messiahs and Nutcrackers to endless versions of A Christmas Carol. ’Twas is a good show but not good enough to bear repeated viewing like the best CdS shows. The narrative is confused and most of the acts have superior equivalents in other CdS shows.

’Twas offers two narratives at once. One, that gives the show its title, is the 1823 poem by the American Clement Clarke Moore called “A Visit from St. Nicholas” but more often referred to as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”. According to the CdS press kit, each of the acts is inspired by lines from the poem, although the connection is often so tenuous as to be non-existent. The line, “Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” paradoxically initiates a big dance number, and the line, “Away to the window I flew like a flash”, somehow inspires a duo roller skating act. Besides this, the acts supposedly inspired by the lines do not follow the order of the lines in the poem. The Hair Suspension routine linked to line 52 “Up the chimney he rose” comes several acts before the Hoop Diving act linked to lines 21-22 when Moore lists the names of Santa’s reindeer.

The narrative of the poem is contained within another narrative involving a Father (Benjamin Thomas Courtenay) and his daughter Isabella (Alivia Beaudoin). Isabella is a typical modern teenager, her ears covered with headphones and her eyes glued to her tablet. Her Father gives her the present of a bicycle but she pays no attention. He physically pries her tablet away from her to read Moore’s poem to her from a giant-sized book. Immediately, Isabella is entranced, so entranced that she literally becomes immersed in the story. Her Father spends the rest of the show trying to find her.

There is no point in being logical about CdS narratives except to say that stories about children literally entering the world of a book as in Michael Ende’s classic The Neverending Story (1979) or Jodi Picoult’s Between the Lines (2012) involve young people who read the books they enter. Here Isabella enters a book her Father is reading to her. It doesn’t quite make sense that the Father is worried that Isabella becomes so involved in the story that she literally slips into it. He could simply stop reading. Ironically, if Hadley means to hold up reading as superior to being plugged in, ’Twas inadvertently demonstrates that Isabella is as much cut off from the real world when she is read to as when she was obsessed with the online world. We have to assume that the circus-like world of the book is more exciting than anything Isabella experiences online.

The great virtue of ’Twas is that its overriding production philosophy harks back to the goal of CdS’s earliest shows – to make the ordinary extraordinary. Early in in the show what looks like an ordinary dining table becomes an “Acrobatic Table”, a platform for use in tumbling, used by an energetic group of seven comic, candy-cane striped performers. At the end a lamp hanging from a long cord becomes an “Aerial Lamp”, where the Father performs an elegant routine similar to those one sees with “corde lisse” or aerial rope. After this, Isabella expresses her delight at receiving a bicycle with a wobbly routine called “Acrobatic Bike” where she rides the bicycle around the stage in almost every way except sitting forward in the seat.

In the most unusual of all these, an act never seen before at a CdS show, a young woman (Masha Terentieva) arrives with a typical hotel trolley. Once it is cleared of the presents she has bought, she stands in it and it is hoisted high above the stage. There she suspends herself in numerous ways from the various metal components of the cart. Frequent circus-goers will realize that the Hotel Cart has been transformed into the equivalent of an apparatus known as an Aerial Cube.

Toronto has most often seen CdS shows intended for a Big Top. The central tent houses an amphitheatre seating for about 2500 around a circular thrust stage which is the prime performing space. The diameter of the circular stage for Koozå (2007), for example, was 36’. ’Twas is intended for a proscenium stage, and Meridian Hall (formerly the Sony Centre) has the widest auditorium size and the widest stage opening in Toronto at 60’. Thus, the stage itself is close to twice as wide as a Big Top stage.

The peculiarity of ’Twas is that performance designer Edisia Moreno, makes very little use of the long, narrow space where the action takes place. Six of the ten acts are situated in upstage centre on the stage leaving huge empty spaces on either side. The act that makes the best use of the entire width of the stage is the seven-man team of Hoop Divers, some of whom begin their run towards the hoops offstage before diving through hoops at various elevations centre stage. The next best would be the team using the Acrobatic Table (they are the same performers as the Hoop Divers). Then would be Isabella on her Acrobatic Bike.

The one act that makes full use of the entire 60’ by 30’ stage opening is the fantastic Diabolo act featuring four Diabolo masters – Hsu-Ting Wang, Shih-Wei Wang, Cheng-Chieh Huang and Heng-Yi Kuo. These performers fling glowing diabolos from cords on one side of the stage, up to near the proscenium top over to the teammates on the other side. To make things even more exciting two of the diaboloists go into the audience to the cross-aisle and cast the diabolos to teammates on the stage. This act is the most electrifying of the entire evening.

Several of the other acts, though all requiring extraordinary talent, are rather too similar in their use of the stage space. Aerial Duo Straps by Sienna Martinez and Holland Lohse, the juggling by clown Eduardo de Jesus Garcia Garza the Hotel Cart act, the Hair Suspension by Jessica Oscar and the Acrobatic Lamp all, except for the juggling, involve a performer or performers hoisted upwards above centre stage, each act concluding with a rapid spin. Of these the Aerial Duo Straps is the most interesting because Martinez and Lohse employ a large range of holds that even seasoned Cirque-goers will not have seen before. Juggler Garcia Garza, though not hoisted aloft, strangely keeps the line of his juggling batons and balls dead centre inside the stage opening.

The acts are separated by energetic dance choreographed with reference to street dance styles by Vinh Nguyen Kinjaz for a six-member ensemble known as Les Tuques because of the winter-ready garb they wear. These dances are usually confined to the middle third of the stage, and Kinjaz seems to run out of ideas about halfway through the evening. Given the mode of street dance it’s odd that Kinjaz has only one performer give only one example of breaking.

At the end the Father and Isabella are happily reunited. Why they are reunited is an unusual question since as far as we know the Father has been sitting in a chair close to Isabella’s bed and Isabella has been in the bed listening to her Father. How they became separated is unknown since the Father has been reading and Isabella has been listening to the same poem. These perplexities mean that the reunion has no emotional effect since we don’t understand how their characters’ situation came about.

Through the show composer Jean-Phi Goncalves has been arranging seasonal music in various dance styles as the accompaniment to the acts. The choice of song often has nothing to do with the nature of the act. Those who treat Christmas as a religious holiday may raise their eye-brows at some of the choices. Santa Claus arrives at the end of the show to Handel’s “Joy to the World”. Let’s think of the words for a minute: “Joy to the world the Lord is come / Let earth receive her King”. I realize that Christmas has become a secular holiday but is this really the best song to greet the appearance of Santa Claus?

Despite their stated inspiration, ’Twas the Night Before…does not actually make it through entire poem by Moore. It ends with an act linked to the list of reindeer (the Hoop Divers are dressed as reindeer) and stops. There show does not even include the poem’s famous final line, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night”.

As an entertainment, ’Twas is best suited to those who have never seen Cirque du Soleil before. For them, the acts will be so new that their execution will push any reservations away. Frequent Cirque-goers, however, will have seen almost all of the these before. Even the attempt of a Tuques to rouse the audience sections into competitive cheering has been done more than once before. Those who want the full-on Cirque du Soleil experience should wait for the revised OVO coming in spring 2025.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Hoop Divers. © 2024 Errison Lawrence. Isabella and Father; Hotel Cart; Diabolos. © 2024 Kyle Flubacker.

For tickets visit: www.cirquedusoleil.com.