REVIEW: Cirque du Soleil’s family-friendly OVO spreads springtime glee like pollen on the breeze
iPhoto caption: Photo by Marie-Andrée Lemire.
Cirque du Soleil’s OVO offers high-octane spectacle in spades, but whether that spectacle amounts to something meaningful is less certain. Despite undergoing major financial turbulence during the last five years, however, Cirque du Soleil still understands straight-up enchantment, and OVO is here to prove it until the end of June, with an eight-week Toronto run in the world’s largest freestanding pop-up tent.
Originally staged in Montreal in 2009 by Brazilian choreographer and director Deborah Colker, OVO is a global carnival, incorporating 52 performers from over 20 countries, structured around a whimsical courting ritual between a cosmopolitan ladybug and a travelling ant called The Voyager. In a kaleidoscopic glade designed by Gringo Cardia, performers wear Liz Vandal’s steampunk-meets-retrofuturist costumes that subtly evoke insect antennae and wings, fusing entomology with circus tradition without literal bug mimicry. In OVO, the lithe performers transform into flying, floating, and falling insects for two 50-minute halves (divided by a 25-minute intermission) of dazzling vignettes, each highlighting the company’s signature blend of precision, control, and sheer athleticism.
The show opens in darkness, crickets chirping amid faintly glowing oversized flowers. A giant grey egg deflates then vanishes, and Berna Ceppas’s Brazilian samba- and bossa nova-inspired score cues the first act. Three foot-juggling red ants set a lasting ebullient tone as they toss beach-ball-sized kiwis from their toes in unison. While later numbers don’t embody as much insect inspiration, this first ant act is the show’s most on-theme number and one of its most charming.
Soon the acts settle into a predictable repeating cycle: one playful act, one dramatic act, and then one clowning scene carried out by Ladybug, The Voyager, and the show’s bumbling cupid, Master Flipo. (A list of character and performer names was provided by Cirque du Soleil in a private press kit after the show.) It seems like a good idea. The structure adds dependable variation and accessibility, but as each scene shifts tonally, the emotional stakes reset, limiting the chance for a dramatic build, reading more like a talent show and less like cohesive theatre.
Yet highlights abound. The aerial strap butterfly pas de deux by Caitlin Quinn and Ernesto Lea Place brims with dynamic tension as they swirl in suspended pictorial shapes, like a bow and arrow poised at mid-draw.
An aerial cradle act with 12 flyers and catchers delivers peak circus art. The performers fly through space like tossed batons before landing back on the beams. The display of trust and timing feels superhuman, and left my jaw agape as the human bodies before me became pendulums of grace and risk.
Slackwire artist Qiu Jiangming visibly strains with effort, thrilling the breath-held crowd in contrast to circus acts that disguise difficulty with flashy ease. As a trepidatious spider, he balances on a wire stretched across a rocking U-shaped structure as his exertion heightens suspense.
And in a final act, over 20 trampolining crickets fling themselves up and down an eight-metre wall as others backflip and spring towards the audience. It’s a fitting pinnacle of coordinated chaos.
At its best, OVO celebrates somatic extremes. Yet for all its visual richness, it rarely attempts to synthesize its acts into a greater message. The interstitial clowning scenes make this disconnect most apparent, but that’s not to say they’re needless. Those episodes help mask an invisible choreography of behind-the-scenes rigging and technical orchestration that merits its own applause but goes, purposely, unnoticed by the audience. The style of comedy in these clowning scenes, too, is perfectly toned for younger audience members and has a nostalgic Saturday morning cartoon sensibility — think babbling conversations that recall the gibberish language of The Sims and slapstick gags like bonking audience members on the head with giant flowers that release a spray of yellow confetti.
But these scenes have little connection to the acts, and compared to something more narratively ambitious like Cirque’s operatic KÀ or dreamy Luzia, OVO pales in emotional resonance and the lasting provocation that I crave from outstanding performing arts.
And one can’t help but return to the egg. It opens the show as a mysterious, oversized symbol with a promise of resolution or at the least thematic engagement. In the beginning, characters flit around it, knowing it contains something vital, but after disappearing early on, a smaller, roughly one-metre-tall version only reappears at the very end to crack ominously in the final moment before the lights go dark, in what feels like a tease for danger or rebirth. But when the lights come up, it’s simply intact again. No explanation, no fallout, no hatching. For a show literally named OVO — Portuguese for egg — it’s a strange omission.
Still, what OVO lacks in narrative or emotional throughline, it compensates for with sheer exuberance. For those seeking springtime joy, it’s a vibrant sensory treat. Perhaps Cirque du Soleil, still recovering financially, is banking on OVO’s broad, family-friendly appeal for safe returns and, for that, it’s a good bet. OVO might not linger in the heart for long, but it’s a hell of a romp for the eyes.
OVO runs in Toronto until June 28, and in Ottawa from July 2 to 6.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
Lindsey King
Lindsey King is a Toronto-based freelance writer and editor with bylines in Toronto Life, Maclean's, Canadian Business, Intermission, and The Creative Independent.
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