Article content Everything old is new again in Kurios – Cabinet of Curiosities and it’s just what our therapists ordered. At a time when the world couldn’t be darker — need I remind you of the headlines of divisive politics and bombs dropping? — the Cirque du Soleil returns to the Big Top in the Old Port with a welcome couple of hours of its trademark awe-inspiring circus poetry that has been taking us to more imaginative places since 1984. The “new” show is actually a revival of a production that premiered at roughly the same spot back in 2014.
Kurios elicited rave reviews back then, and it has lost none of its creative spark during the past decade, when it was performed more than 2,500 times around the globe. Kurios really is the Cirque at its best and that’s partly because it’s also the Montreal-based circus at its most original. For a while there in the years before the pandemic, there was a sameness to Cirque shows and, even worse, a misguided attempt to add trendy things like BMX bikes or Hollywood-style thriller plot twists.
The Cirque also tried to tell stories in its shows, also a huge mistake. Remember Toruk, the 2015 arena show based on the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar? No? Exactly. It was imminently forgettable and proved the Cirque is not about narrative.
Kurios is precisely what the Cirque should be doing — presenting a dizzying array of spectacular performances that have us shaking our heads in disbelief at what we’re seeing and creati.
