Cirque du Soleil is not coming to Cambridge, but that’s okay: The 7 Fingers are here for most of this month at the American Repertory Theater with its “Passengers,” a show that had audience members Thursday – this is true – hooting and shrieking in delighted shock at the feats onstage.
The Montreal circus troupe (which fields a crew of 10 in “Passengers”) has specialized in this stuff since 2002, and knows how to keep a crowd enthralled. Some rough edges at its second show in town, be it a recovered lyric in a song strummed on a ukulele or some good-naturedly sloppy juggling before hitting a stride, were hard to hold against performers showing off such daring and athleticism when the stunts began to rely on precision in the face of danger.
That’s because these players aren’t just rolling and tumbling, as good as they are at rolling and tumbling, but up in the air on sashes of cloth, trapezes or poles and just as quickly falling or sliding to the ground (shriek) only to be caught by fellow performers or stop themselves inches from disaster (hoot). Anyone who thinks they’re beyond being impressed by hula-hooping hasn’t seen what Méliejade Tremblay-Bouchard can do with one – or four, or more – and how director Shana Carroll can get the entire troupe hooping it up in ways that escalate into a dazzle. Anyone who thinks they know trapeze may find their eyes widening at Carroll’s hand-to-trap techniques that see one or more performers being exchanged between the ground and the sky with the taut snap usually reserved for a football or basketball being swapped in a pro game. You know, things that bounce if they’re dropped, rather than shatter. (Carroll choreographs for Cirque du Soleil too. Hand-to-trap was introduced 11 years ago for that group’s “Paramour,” and she has brought it back, with variations, in shows for both groups.)
The trick of the dance and theater form called circus is not that the acts look easy – because there is no trick here – but that it’s accomplished while not looking easy at all. That’s true whether it’s an acrobatic contortion or troupe member Michael Patterson supporting two of his fellow performers as they climb him to form a human pole toward the end of a 90-minute, no-intermission show of more or less constant movement. You can see the exertion of supporting two people on his shoulders; Patterson is shaking, even though one of those people is the lithe Marie-Christine Fournier, who otherwise seems to defy gravity. When the formation breaks up, you feel relieved. Then you feel a jolt of terror-filled suspense as they do it again.
The 7 Fingers are masters at building tension, then releasing it – hence the audience’s unrestrained responses throughout and lengthy standing ovation at the end.
Are they good at telling a story? “Passengers” is described by Carroll as exploring train travel as “a metaphor for a lifetime, and all the beautiful, unexpected things that happen along the way, and the times when the ride is cut too short, and sad departures and happy arrivals” – and that is fine to keep in the back of the mind as the show represents through sound and music, lights and projected imagery, props, dance and some (pretty good) mime the more literal kind of train and some playful scenarios for what happens on them: You become engrossed in something a fellow passenger is doing; you become annoyed by a fellow passenger; you strike up a relationship with a fellow passenger; you are robbed by a fellow passenger. In a scene that captures the poignancy of saying goodbyes, the metaphor takes unexpected shape in those bolts of stark white cloth, which an aerialist ascends by becoming entangled. It’s a surprising way to think about becoming disentangled from bonds for the freedom of travel. Still not sure it works, but the acrobatics and staging are gorgeous.
Some short monologues are undermined by performers who are out of breath and athletes being asked to emote – and in clearly not their first language – and a sound system on some unhelpful setting to accentuate the least helpful parts of a voice: obstruents instead of sonorants? The opposite? I don’t know what was going wrong here, but something was. (The essential Isabella Diaz is an exception to this, whether speaking or singing. She nearly elevates the show, if briefly, into musical theater.) After an extended discussion of time dilation, which explains why time moves different for people traveling and proves Fournier is a brilliant human cartoon as well as a stunning gymnast, the final stretch of “Passengers” all but drops the conceit of travel for an interval with Téo Le Baut and a pole.
I suspect the script was just set aside to get in more good stuff, and it’s hard to complain about getting more good stuff. There’s enough sweat onstage without also having to strain to adhere to a theme. But something else occurred to me as “Passengers” ended, returning for a moment to the imagery with which it started: That many journeys such as the show explores reach a point of lulling the passenger into forgetting they’re on a journey. It can be a literal jolt and an awakening to pull into a station and remember you’ve been moving, that you entered and now must leave a respite from reality.
The “Passengers” concept is a pretext, for sure. But it’s an enjoyable one that enhances some literally thrilling feats of dexterity, muscularity and cleverness with sophisticated staging and sound design (apart from those speeches). Cirque du Soleil is bringing its Christmas show, “’Twas The Night Before …,” to Boston this winter, and between the plodding, overbearing obviousness of that spectacle and a gloss of plot about trains with a touch of Einstein, I’ll take the Cambridge version every time.
“Passengers” through Sept. 26 at the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Mainstage, 64 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge.
The feature image for this story, which is not the image seen above, had black background at the far left and right added in a digital retouching process. The people in the image were photographed and are real and unchanged in the retouching.
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