And what to our wondering eyes should appear— why it’s a holiday extravaganza live at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre! Dashing in from the rooftops to kick off the holiday season, Cirque du Soleil proudly presents ‘Twas The Night Before…, a wondrously enchanting, theatrical spectacle that combines the vivaciously thrilling acrobatic and aerial work that Cirque-shows are known for with a cherished Christmas classic, Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, A Visit From Saint Nicolas. Conceived and Directed by Cirque du Soleil’s senior Artistic Director James Hadley, this whimsical wondrous holiday adventure puts a fun and fantastical spin on the iconic holiday poem as it springs to life before your very eyes featuring a variety of characters that will keep you gasping in awe and chuckling in delight from start to finish.
With 16 men and 10 women from 14 different countries in each cast, as well as 17-backstage support staff, Cirque du Soleil’s ‘Twas The Night Before… is chock-a-block with wonder and merriment. The show launches, as most Cirque shows do, with a little audience warm-up featuring three of the ‘Les Tuques’, those mischievous dancing wonder-sprites, whom I’ve affectionately referred to as ‘ClownCorps’, crawling out from under the proscenium curtain, dancing and clowning just to make sure the audience is ready for the show. Les Tuques (Jenna Beltran, Kateryna Cherniasvska, Valeria Cruz-Colon, Carol Darang, Maya Kehill Abrams, Samuel Moore) serve as our narrative-drivers. They push, pull, dance, and tug the story along, often filling the gaps between acts with their delightful clowning, their meticulously executed dance routines, and their silly shenanigans— including some call-and-response with the audience! These six sensational dancers work to original music composed by Jean-Phi Goncalves (the show’s composer and Musical Director) as well as 12 iconic holiday carols, revisited and orchestrated by Goncalves to fit the show’s unique spirit of Christmas. You’ll never run out of whimsy and fun to be had with these spirited performers, especially when they’re racing up and down the quarter-pipe at the back of the stage.
Speaking of the quarter-pipe, the show’s props and scenery and overall lighting design (on the whole, the magnificent Cirque du Soleil design team) creates miraculous holiday marvels which are simply astonishing. The light play alone, whenever Jolly (Eduardo de Jesus Garcia Garza) tosses his magical thumb-light up onto the tinsel-icicle curtains that frame the back stage, is spectacular. The sleight-of-hand execution with this trick, as well as whenever ‘Jolly’ and the ‘Les Tuques’ are tossing their lights around is mesmerizing. And it wouldn’t be a Christmas show without— SNOW! There’s 5,000 cubic feet of artificial snow in use for this production, 100 tons of scenery, lighting, cables, and equipment— oh, and did we mention the 52 different costumes created from over 125 different materials, featuring 2,000 sequins PER COSTUME!? It’s indescribably astonishing. (And there’s some insane statistics about the amount of glitter used for these 26 performers, but let’s just say it’s close to the amount of artificial snow featured in the production.)
The story itself, woven together conceptually by James Hadley, features this modern notion of a tweenaged, Gen-Z kid— Isabella (Alicia Beaudoin) who is ‘too cool for Christmas’, doesn’t want her Father (Benjamin Courtenay) to read her their Christmas tradition of A Visit From Saint Nicolas, and thinks that the present he brought her— a bicycle, is lamer than lame. Isabella is obsessed with her headphones, taking selfies with her tablet, and having an all-round-teenage-tude. But that is when the magic begins. Remember Les Tuques? They suck her right into the story, and the poem unwinds around ten different Cirque-Acts, all of which are threaded into different holiday tunes and scenes that fit the poem. It’s dazzling.
You get an Ice Princess and Ice Prince (referred to as the ‘Aerial Duo Straps’, Yulia Goryagina and Antonio Dos Santos, of Russia and Brazil, respectively) who perform hypnotizing feats 20 feet in the air! Their aerial work is extraordinary; the amount of sheer strength and core stability this duo shares as they spin round and round in the air, tumbling over one another, holding positions that defy gravity is nothing but jaw-dropping. And their act is initiated by the poem line, “…as leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky…” And while Goryagina and Dos Santos twirl and whirl magnificently through the air, in their icy blue and glitter-bright cobalt costumes, a wintery wonderland of snow rains down all around them, completing the spectacle.
Zipping right along from wondrous beauty into hilarious nonsense, you get the ‘Acro Table’ performers (featuring Sekou Camara, Phelipe Da Silva Albuquerque, Lucas De Melo, Remi Girard, Quentin Greco, Adam Grondin, Evan Tomlinson) in these zany striped onesie-pajama outfits. They tumble and throw themselves all around the stage, flipping over each other, jumping off of one another, and it’s hilarious. They’re playing at being sleeping children all nestled in their beds with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, only these children are wide-awake and causing comic chaos as they fling themselves all around. It’s wild and particularly breathtaking as some of their acrobatic stunts look quite dangerous— particularly when they’re stacked on top of one another and start to pitch over, only to tumble-fall, and make a hilarious spectacle of themselves. You can catch these seven acro-tumblers at the show’s finale as Santa’s Reindeer, who go leaping through hoops— where the highest hoop is 10 feet high and the narrowest hoop to dive through is just 18 inches in diameter. This is a show-stopping finale like no other and they really have the audience in rapt attention by the time they get to this closing-number.
But before we get to the end with the eight dancing, prancing, leaping, flying reindeer, we’ve got to experience the wonder of Maria Terentieva, who is half-contortionist, half-aerial artists. Dressed like a Sugar Plum Celebrity Diva, she sets herself in motion performing on a specially constructed hotel-luggage cart, suspending, twisting, and contorting her body into all sorts of wild positions that defy physics. And as if this weren’t enough of a razzle-dazzle spectacle, she then lets the hotel-luggage-cart launch into the air suspended as she flings herself around its bars, balances from its internal and external structures high above the stage floor. And she’s quickly followed by our Les Tuques in a ‘blizzard-storm-scene’ (and a few others) who get the stage clear of all the artificial snow debris so that they can pave the way for the next exciting act.
Looking like something from Christmas Past, in their lamé teal and pink costuming, The Roller Duo (who should absolutely be called Christmas-Disco-Skating-Ken-&-Barbie because they have that permanently perfect look of holiday happiness plastered on their faces and the male in the duo has that artificial plastic ken hair, even though it’s sparkly aqua-teal in color) performs some crazy acrobatic tricks, spinning at a top speed of 30mph on a 6-feet-in-diameter platform. Did I mention it’s not just spinning each other in circles? It’s literally having Melania Lester, the female of the duo, climbing and hooking herself around Jesse Ferreira, the male of the duo, and hanging from his arms or legs or shoulders in an outward suspension as they whip round and round the 250-lb circular platform. There’s even a trick where he loops her by her hair and spins her around at 30mph from her hair. It’s another one of those description-defying feelings of awe and wonderment.
Jessica Oscar follows this dynamic duo and at first one does wonder what she could possibly do that we haven’t yet already seen. Oscar is an aerial artist. We’ve had quite a bit of that already. But no, Oscar elevates things to an astonishing level because not only is she an aerial artist, but she’s fully suspended by her hair. Her HAIR. With the quote from the poem altered to fit the fit the female performer, “…and laying her finger aside of her nose, and giving a nod, up the chimney she rose!” And rise she does! Oscar twirls around in the air, suspended by her hair doing all sorts of aerial acrobatic tricks. Twirling approximately 100 times throughout the routine, Oscar’s hair can withstand 250 pounds of pressure, and at her greatest speed, spins seven times per minute during her feature. Eye-popping and jaw-dropping entertainment for sure.
One of the most enchanting parts of the evening, at least for me, was the mystifying Diablo Work presented in this performance. Not one, not two, not three, but four Diablo Artists (Shuo-Chin Chien, Yan Chuan-Shen, Yu-Ti Chung, Ho-Li Tsao, all from Taiwan) mesmerize the audience with their light-up diablo-play. Not only do the start the routine with a mind-bending illusion of an invisible, hovering diablo that rotates in pure darkness around the stage and out over the audience, but their bring their string-spinning tricks out into the house. They fling the diablos from halfway back in the orchestra section of the audience all the way up onto the stage. There are double-length ropes, jump-rope style tricks, fast spins, tosses, and even more to be had with this complex, yo-yo-like acrobatic device. Their energy is fierce, their performance divine.
And they are last of the group performances until we see the Acro-Table-Tumblers-Turned-Reindeer-Hoop-Divers at the show’s finale. But before we can reach the arrival of Jolly-Come-Santa (Eduardo de Jesus Garcia Garza, who is featured early in the show as a peddler with juggling clubs and he does an astonishing job of doing everything from simple three-toss patterns to speed-demon whip rotations with shiny silver clubs, peppermint balls, and light-up snowflake clubs, and all sorts of tricks in-between) in his magnificent red-Santa suit, we must feature The Father (Benjamin Courtenay.) Who becomes an Aerial Lamp performer. Slow, graceful, almost like a ballet dance in-air, the father is telling a fully emotional story with his aerial work on the swinging lamp. It feels like a sense of loss and longing, trying to find the joys of a Christmas long ago when his little girl still loved their family traditions. This is wrapped up when Father (Courtenay) is reunited with Isabella (Alicia Beaudoin.) And remember that present from the top of the show? The bicycle that Isabella didn’t really want? Beaudoin takes to it like a circus-born-natural, doing tricks, spins, stand-up rides, uni-wheel pops and then some all around the stage before the grand-hoop-flying-Reindeer-finale.
It’s an ultimate Christmas wonderland popping with mesmerizing and dazzling talent, so much fun and dancing and breath-taking feats that you won’t be able to blink for the whole 90 minutes that the show is happening. It’s truly a Christmas miracle and will delight young audiences as well as audiences who are young at heart! Made for the whole family, ‘Twas The Night Before… is truly a Christmas Gift that you won’t want to miss before it leaves Charm City!
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission
‘Twas The Night Before…by Cirque Du Soleil plays through December 3rd 2023 at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre on the Main Stage of The France-Merrick Performing Arts Center- 12 North Eutaw Street Baltimore, MD 21201. For tickets call (410) 837-7400 or purchase them online.
