Cirque du Soleil: From J to Z - A Fantasia

It feels familiar enough at the start: a bluesy piano intro, a playful back-and-forth exchange between a pair of horns... but within a few minutes, the stage lighting has turned practically psychedelic. Figures begin weaving through the dinner tables, masked like animals but garbed in sequined dresses and hip suits. Soon they are forming small human pyramids and doing somersaults off the piano. Two teams start an unexpected game of catch by flinging the double bass across the stage. Not the direction anyone would normally imagine a cozy club show taking, but of course From J to Z is not an ordinary show.

With decades of theatrical epics under their belt, it was seemingly time for Cirque du Soleil to come—at least some what—down to earth. The theme this time is a fantastical dream-tour through the history and legends of America's Music. The show's creators were apparently inspired by the simplicity of going small-scale, and it made an inspiring challenge to keep their creativity intact while toning down the acrobatics. (Part of it was also simple economics: while there are only so many big-city arenas to keep revisiting, the wealth of devoted jazz audiences in clubs across the world is practically limitless.)

Whatever the reasons, this CD/DVD package shows them exploring the format to impressively clever results. The story follows a young dreamer known simply as Z, beginning with his early grade-school days when he stumbles on an unused recorder in a junk closet, then showing his miraculous journey through to the glamorous life of a working oboist. The toe-tapping fantasy features a series of familiar jazz legends appearing in dream form like a series of Dickens ghosts: we meet (among others) a jolly Louis Armstrong mugging for the younger kids, a sardonic Nina Simone trading snappy verses with Tony Bennett, and most heartwarmingly, a scary-seeming troll figure guarding a bridge who soon transforms into a kindly Sonny Rollins.

The troupe makes clever use of the entire venue, from frequent dancing among the tables to a spur-of-the-moment game of charades with the bartenders. When the drummer gets an urgent text and dashes offstage, two dancers smoothly step in to recreate a Buddy Rich-style drum duel on the floor toms. Unlike most Cirque productions, the performance itself is never static—the video presented on this release bears little or no resemblance to what you would actually see at any other show. There is no telling which combination of tap-dancing, circus stunts, trumpet-juggling, pyrotechnics and/or beatboxing will happen from one night to another.

What about the music itself, you ask? For a team not entirely familiar with the milieu, they handle it at least as thoroughly and respectfully as in a Ken Burns documentary. Their trademark cinematic sweeps are continually peppered with the odd ragtime lick or mini-vibraphone solo. Traces of several classic chestnuts naturally appear, often mutated into more theatrical forms, although thankfully not pop-ified as some past productions have been (with only one unfortunate exception for an overly commercial encore).

The video of course, is the real draw here, but the CD soundtrack makes a more-than-adequate background dinner soundtrack on its own, at least as long as you skip the second-act passage where a rainbow-wigged Duke Ellington takes a startling detour into Stockhausen electronica. What they might lack in extensive jazz study, they make up for in honoring its true surprise-around-every-corner spirit. As a tour through music—and more importantly, the imagination—the troupe still never disappoints.