Motorcycle circus act is a wild one
Four motorcyclists zoom inside a cagelike steel globe in the high point of “Cirque Shanghai Extreme” at Navy PierBY HEDY WEISS, Theater Critic, Chicago Sun-Times
Updated: July 11, 2011
Cirque Shanghai Extreme, the Chinese circus world’s equivalent of this country’s professional baseball farm teams, has returned to Navy Pier for its sixth consecutive season at the Skyline Stage.
It remains a charming family entertainment, if hardly the pinnacle of circus mastery.
Yet watching this latest edition, which runs the gamut from apprentice-level routines to a couple of knockout acts (one of which easily would generate envy in any Hell’s Angels type who might happen to catch it), you understand why this enterprise has become such a long-lived summer attraction here.
For a start, many of the performers are very young and quite guileless (one charismatic little acrobat-contortionist must be no older than 7 or 8), and clearly they are in the earliest stages of their careers after years of training. They make occasional bloopers and look shakier and less supremely polished than true veterans as they move through their very brief acts. But these fledgling artists have been well coached in how to make the most of everything, and how to take bows with big smiles and the air of a job well done.
In addition, unlike Cirque du Soleil, whose ticket prices seem pegged to the salaries of hedge-fund honchos, Cirque Shanghai comes with modestly priced admission for a 75-minute spectacle that moves quickly, is full of color and seems ideally suited to abbreviated attention spans.read more:http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/weiss/6390987-417/motorcycle-circus-act-is-a-wild-one.html
Yet watching this latest edition, which runs the gamut from apprentice-level routines to a couple of knockout acts (one of which easily would generate envy in any Hell’s Angels type who might happen to catch it), you understand why this enterprise has become such a long-lived summer attraction here.
For a start, many of the performers are very young and quite guileless (one charismatic little acrobat-contortionist must be no older than 7 or 8), and clearly they are in the earliest stages of their careers after years of training. They make occasional bloopers and look shakier and less supremely polished than true veterans as they move through their very brief acts. But these fledgling artists have been well coached in how to make the most of everything, and how to take bows with big smiles and the air of a job well done.
In addition, unlike Cirque du Soleil, whose ticket prices seem pegged to the salaries of hedge-fund honchos, Cirque Shanghai comes with modestly priced admission for a 75-minute spectacle that moves quickly, is full of color and seems ideally suited to abbreviated attention spans.read more:http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/weiss/6390987-417/motorcycle-circus-act-is-a-wild-one.html
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