Tysons II is currently hosting the Luzia show of Cirque Du Soleil under the 2,000 plus capacity popup tents. Tickets are pricy, and parking is outrageous at $25 per vehicle, immediately adjacent to free mall parking. Even if you were to park and walk through the mall like a normal customer, the most direct route to the tent crosses the paid parking area, and lot attendants pursue you with the intensity of ICE, asking where you parked. At least they asked, whereas masked ICE simply grab and go, without due process. My children were terrorized by the guard’s threats, but we escaped custody. Fortunately for us (unfortunate for so many others), the real forces are still massed a few miles away in DC.
It’s a series of tents for this circus. Inside the field space but outside the arena are a collection of portable toilets that we visited on the way in, so that the two kids could sit (relatively) still through the first half of the show. More on these later.
Luzia is a combination of Spanish words for light (luz) and rain (lluvia), with a Mexican-themed dream series of stunts and entertainment involving both lighting and water effects. The fear of an ICE raid interrupting the spectacle was not completely unfounded, as Virginia’s governor is known to follow the president’s lead in discriminating against Mexicans who do dangerous work so that white people don’t have to. Our Sunday show luckily flew under the radar.
The show started out with some hombre playing acoustic guitar, who was then joined by brass players, dressed in traditional Mexican couture. A couple of senoritas dressed as birds pranced through the crowd, waving their feathery arms as people tried to find their seats. Some additional dancers joined the fiesta. With the back of house being 12 on the radial clockface, 6 o’clock being center stage facing out, we were somewhere around 9 on the dial. With the often spinning stage and the frenetic activity everywhere, it was not like watching the profiles of people talking to the other side of the stage; there were no bad seats, except for the people immediately adjacent to my annoying son who would not stop talking the entire time. “Where did all the water go?” “Why doesn’t that guy just turn around?” “Did he mean to do that?” Curiosity is a cat-killer, but Catherine was better behaved.
After the introductory music, the lights dimmed and they announced a Mexican flight plan, cruising at 30,000 feet, and a clown skydiver was lowered down on a harness (like Tom Cruise in the first MI movie). He mimed a failing parachute before pulling an umbrella from the pack that he used to safely land on stage.
The clown / mime character recurred throughout the show as an interlude between set changes, entertaining the audience with silly antics before the next set of circus freaks did their feats of strength and agility. Teddy could not grasp his purpose, as he asked me countless questions about this part of the show.
El Bozo (not his real name) wandered the strange desert stage, looking for water to fill his canteen, before stumbling across a large wind-up key that kickstarted the craziness. After twisting the dial, the trampoline / treadmill sped to life, and a giant horse came galloping out behind a butterfly lady with wings trailing behind her!
Dark-clad roadies set up a series of vertical hoops, through which performers jumped like show dogs, albeit with more flips and rolls. One errant leg caught a loop and tumbled the stack, but it was quickly reset before the next acrobat arrived to dive through. “Was that on purpose?” quizzed the critical son. “No. Shut up and enjoy the show.”
A strongman did a series of one-handed stands atop a tower of flexible posts, progressing higher in the air for further dares. He’d intermix iron crosses and dips and flips. A couple of ladies rolled out giant hula hoops in which they’d spin circles around a woman doing a ropes course in the middle of the stage. From the top, they then dropped a cascade of water through which all three continued to impress, though now in wet dress.
They cycled the falling “rain” into visual patterns, fulfilling the lluvia theme. There was a giant disk on the backdrop of the stage, against which different images would be projected during different parts of the show, for the luz. Our seats gave us a less than ideal cross angle vantage, so we saw less of the light spectacle behind the performers as we focused on the circus stars themselves.
“Where did the water go?” wondered the ever-inquisitive boy beside me. The exact mechanics of the stage drainage were hard to ascertain and explain without taking apart the platform or seeing some schematics, so Teddy had to settle for “down the drain.” They also snuck out high-powered vacuums to suck up any lingering moisture before the next dry run.
A couple of guys juggled soccer balls like pros. Because they were on stage and not on the pitch… “Why aren’t they wearing soccer cleats?”
Finally, intermission.
Twenty minutes to watch two thousand people try to cycle through fifty portajohns. Sai took Catherine and disappeared, while Teddy and I picked the longest possible line. It was not helped by the fact that we witnessed a gentleman talking through a trapped person who could not unlatch the door for the can for which we were waiting. I expected a young child to come out after the several minutes of “turn it towards you and pull”, but eventually an older lady extricated herself to much embarrassment (and some applause).
By the time it was Teddy’s turn, the lines were gone and the tents were again filled. No one there to witness his own entrapment inside the box, except for me. I reiterated the same instructions I’d heard the earlier hero use to rescue the old lady. Ironically, I’d laughed earlier that day at my brother’s story of needing to use the fire department to break into his own bathroom after his two-year old locked herself inside. And now I was wondering if I would need to call 911 to bust my boy out.
In fairness, the guy who talked the old lady out of the trap admitted that he knew the intricacies because he too had found himself struggling with the latch earlier. When we pregame peed, I did find the door difficult to seal. These were those “fancy” flushing, portable toilets, with running water in the sink, with aluminum doors and trims instead of the typical plastic pools of nasty blue poo water. Teddy had already navigated the mechanics of getting in and out of one without any drama, but perhaps this particular latrine was cursed, as it’s uncannily long line seemed to suggest.
Finally Teddy popped the door open, and I was ready to shuffle him back to the show (I gave up on the idea of using the facilities myself, in the interest of not missing any further Luzia action). Instead, Teddy yelled that he hadn’t gone yet, because he’d spent the last five minutes not trying to open the door, but struggling with how to lock it! “Just close the door and pee. I’ll make sure no one breaks in while you’re in there”… not that there was anyone left waiting to go by this point. He then complained that the toilet flush button didn’t work well either, and burst into tears about how horrible the bathroom situation was. “Why would they use these terrible toilets?” More questions that I could not answer.
We eventually made it back to Door #5 for our area of seating, to a pitch-black arena, with only the stage showing any light. There there were people rappelling from the ceiling assembly, dancing circles around the edge of the stage, and doing other cool tricks without preamble (for we had missed the start). It took several minutes of waiting in the back for the scene to wrap and enough luz to help us find our seats.
Another juggler, using three batons rather than a soccer ball and hands instead of feet raced across the stage with great alacrity and dexterity, but juggling three batons is not that special. Boom, a drum announced a fourth baton, dropped from above, and he raced around some more. Still, only four? That’s like one more than three last time I checked. Boom, #5 soon arrived. The spinning sticks glowed in the stage lighting, and he added in extra tricks like backflips before topping out with #6. Sure, there was a flub during one of the moves “yes, Teddy, that was on purpose”, but give Jughead a break; it was quite impressive.
They had a couple of platform swings on which multiple people could stand on the benches, synchronizing motions until launching a body from one to the other, with aerial flips in between. With each leap you’d hold your breath and hope the timing was flawless, else the miss would be ugly.
The most popular act in my sick family’s twisted opinion was the human pretzel, the contortionist who did things with his body that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It was inhuman. “Does he have a spine?” I didn’t know the answer, because I couldn’t find any rational explanation for the moves. I’ve known plenty of people who figuratively stuck their heads up their own asses, but this was the first guy who could literally pull it off. Kids, please do not try this at home.
As the show wound down, all the performers came out on stage and danced around a festive meal scene, before suddenly freezing in space. Except El Bozo, who couldn’t figure out why the entire cast less himself converted into mannequins. “What happened to them daddy?” this time from my right, as Catherine wanted some answers. “Elsa must have frozen them” was the best I could come up with on the spot. Our protagonist clown again found the key at the top of the stage that he’d turned two hours before to kickstart the action. Turning it again, he reanimated the players who cleared the stage before coming back for final bows. Catherine told me that she spotted one of the cast members move her head slightly during the pause; everyone’s a critic!
In summary: Park at your own risk; Use the toilets inside the mall; Don’t ask too many questions; Enjoy the show! Luzia is a spectacle.
Traipse Reports - Trips and Races 