Jeremy Welch samples the circus for grown-ups, with the award-winning Australian circus cabaret sensation Rouge.
★★★★
Rouge is an Australian production with a professional and talented troupe of artists. The show is advertised as ‘….a celebration of the astonishing, surprising, subversive and supremely sexy.’
It is all of the above featuring – circus acts with a sexy twist, burlesque, dance, a splattering of cabaret and oddly enough some very amusing opera. With this potpourri of genres it is difficult to build a narrative arc that gives the entire production a story line. This in no way diminishes each separate vignette.
The circus acts are well choreographed and daring in their execution. The sexy vignette is an amusing but, depending on one’s sexual taste, a glimpse of the unusual. A performer arrives on stage with a lampshade on his head and through various contortions strips off.
Credit: Mark Turner
The rest of the cast arrive similarly wearing lampshades of which one female member of the cast is adorned with a carrot strap-on dildo. It is salacious without being crude. The rest I will leave to your imagination or your viewing when you attend the show.
The operatic performance, although seemingly unrelated to the rest of the show, is powerful as her voice is really quite something.
Rather wonderfully the aria being sung is beautifully executed and as the tempo reaches each new false horizon on the march to the summit of the last note there is a very amusing, raunchy and wholly unexpected surprise for the audience.
What this show lacks in narrative arc is easily made up for as each individual genre is executed with aplomb, professionalism, skill, daring and humour.
The audience loved it.
Assembly Rooms – Music Hall
Aug 6, 8-13, 15-20, 22-25.
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