Zarkana

Radio City Music Hall

New York

(866) 858-0008

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Don’t let the “extra layers of lavish digital technology” distract you, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Zarkana strictly adheres to the Cirque du Soleil formula: a “baroque, sometimes bewildering” set; a New Agey score; a “smidgen” of a plot—this one involving a magician who searches for his lost love—and “a series of familiar, reliably exciting old-school circus acts.” It’s only unfortunate that the most “oppressive” aspects of the Cirque aesthetic, the contrived exotica and the bombastic music, are here “amplified to steroidal levels.” Writer-director François Girard may have thought this “cacophonous sound and light show” was necessary to fill Radio City Music Hall’s immense stage, but all it does is detract from the “aah-inspiring feats” of the performers.

Zarkana, alas, “offers little we haven’t seen before,” said Frank Scheck in the New York Post. There is something to be said for Girard’s art direction—the use of vines creeping up an old proscenium creates the unsettling illusion of a Radio City in decay—and his use of the theater’s “magnificent Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organs” is a nice touch. Yet the theater “lacks the intimacy of the giant tents” that the company usually uses to display its stunts. And while this show “includes some truly spectacular acts” involving high wires and acrobats, little is particularly memorable, especially for those who’ve seen similar feats in previous Cirque shows. “What once seemed innovative has become numbingly familiar.” That familiarity is “beginning to breed contempt.” Through Oct. 8