Frédérik Sisa

What happens when you take an acclaimed illusionist, wrap him up in a Cirque du Soleil production, and put the whole shebang on a Vegas stage? A lesson in the value of reading reviews before watching your money suffer an irrevocable disappearing act. Of course, as a critic I prefer to approach a play, a movie, a production, without the prejudice of other reviews. It doesn’t usually make a difference what other critics think, but there’s something to be said for the tabula rasa approach. Yet, by Houdini, had I possessed an inkling of the calamity that is Believe - on stage at the Luxor – I would have certainly gone to any one of the other Vegas shows.

There is a scene in which the indeterminate monster Carol (voice of James Gandolfini) erupts into a rage and rips an arm off his bird-like friend Douglas (voice of Chris Cooper). There is no fountain of blood; sand trickles out of the stump. If that surprising, whitewashed act of violence — this is a movie based on a children’s book? — isn’t enough, one-armed Douglas spends the rest of his screentime with a twig pathetically jammed into the stump.

I can hardly think of anything more overblown and uninteresting than President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. With the peanut gallery overcome with hysteria and the floor littered with broken hearts torn from chests – where’s Campaign Obama, people ask? Where are the accomplishments? — it seems like there’s nothing else of any importance going on in the world.

Stories centered around a) sports and b) underdogs inevitably expose themselves to a climactic dilemma: Do the plucky challengers win that crucial match against seemingly invincible champions or do they build character through a glorious second-place finish? Call it the Robert Frost conundrum; the end result involves taking the predictable road to avoid taking the other predictable road

The latest version of Ronald Reagan’s famous statement that “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” comes from Charles Grassley, the Republican Senator from Iowa. In arguing against a public healthcare insurance option that would allegedly bankrupt the county, Sen. Grassley said “Government is not a competitor. Government is a predator.” He neglected to add “with big fangs, sharp claws, and a really mean disposition.” I wrote about this faux-anarchist anti-publicanism a few months ago, but this time I have to raise the question of motivation and integrity.

Although I’m sorely tempted to offer up yet another “plague on both your houses” column this week, I thought we could all take a break from hurling contempt at irrational Republican and spineless Democrats. Instead, I want to talk about music - specifically, local musicians that I think are very much worth a good long listen.

A delightful penchant for inappropriately spouting Shakespeare in the midst of a children’s play isn’t the only sign of life beneath Arcady’s worn façade. A sparkle in actor Aleksey Maklakov’s eye, a burst of passion, a gesture…we get the feeling there is a bon vivant coiled inside Arcady, suppressed by the inertia of countless years performing the same role in the same play in the same theatre. This inertia has the entire cast stuck in rut but it is Arcady who has the talent and passion to be more than a rabbit in a cutesy fairytale. The role of King Lear, for example, beckons.

There’s a dose of Cirque du Soleil in Daisuke Tsuji’s Sole Mate and Death and Giggles, which is no surprise given his tour as a clown with the Japanese edition of Dralion. The great physicality in his performance — drawing on all the usual clowning disciplines of mime and physical comedy, and more — matched by the ability to evoke an almost child-like sense of wonder certainly distills an essence of the Cirque. The comparison is apt; Death and Giggles is very much a non-narrative piece of performance art more loosely sketched and surreal than coherent and realistic.

While driving to and fro the other day, I noticed a bus completely encapsulated in advertising. It doesn’t matter who the ad was for – they’ve got plenty of attention as it is. What matters is that the ad was so tightly and completely wrapped that it was impossible to tell which transit system the bus belonged to. Only a bit of orange on the front gave any indication. And I wondered: Where has the romance of the public transit system gone?

9 could have been an eloquent eulogy for an extinct civilization from the perspective of non-human life, ironically cast as humanity’s unwitting legacy to an otherwise dead planet. As the titular, doll-like hero gains those first glimmers of consciousness and takes hesitant steps into a world of rubble and ashen skies, the gloom of a masterfully articulated, post-apocalyptic landscape takes a firm hold. How and why the world ends is, of course, one of the film’s key mysteries, alongside other concerns such as what the dolls (dubbed “stitchpunks” by Acker) are and how it is they can be alive. But though wildly stirring the senses with stunning imagery of potent, melancholy beauty – the kind that crowns director Shane Acker with the risky title of visionary – 9 blunts with a story that gradually subjects its premise to the slow death of déjà-vu.