Acrobatic show with a personal touch
Cuisine and Confessions
1/2 (out of 4) Created and directed by Shana Carroll and Sébastien Soldevila. Until Dec. 4 at the Princess of Wales Theatre, 300 King St. W., mirvish.com, 416-872-1212 or 1-800-461-3333 Food, family, friendship, love . . . and circus? That’s the unlikely recipe for Cuisine and Confessions, the latest show by Montreal’s globally successful 7 Fingers company to visit Toronto.
Cuisine and Confessions was created in 2014; three new performers have recently joined its nine-person ensemble. Dealing with cast changes, plus the challenge of playing material premised on intimacy in the 2,000-seat Princess of Wales Theatre, may be contributing factors to the show feeling a bit undercooked.
Cuisine and Confessions grew out of co-creators Shana Carroll and Sébastien Soldevila’s shared love of cooking (they are a real-life couple as well as 7 Fingers founding members), and awareness of the ways in which food brings people together and can be a conduit for childhood memories. They built the 90-minute show out of material generated in storytelling sessions with the original ensemble. The show attempts something quite ambitious in its combination of circus acts, acrobatic choreography, monologues about performers’ personal histories, audience interaction, an original jazz-pop score and realtime food prep. Part of its charm is the gradual realization that the gorgeously elaborate kitchen (designed by Ana Cappelluto) is functional: everyone is invited to partake of pasta and banana bread at the end.
The performers do all they can to draw spectators in, working the crowd pre-show by taking turns at an onstage microphone asking questions and delivering anecdotes, and running up and down the aisles to chat and flirt. A few audience members are brought onstage; on opening night, a woman named Rachel was romanced by a lovelorn, omelette-wielding performer — a sweet sequence. Less so was an attempt at conversation between three spectators while the company pretended to hide behind the set.
The show is at its strongest when the cast lets loose and show off their prodigious circus skills. An early high point is Sidney Bateman’s and Melvin Diggs’ Chinese hoop act, in which they jump through and tumble around small wooden frames against a recorded monologue about Diggs’ memories of Saturday morning breakfasts with his mom in St. Louis.
But too much of the show feels like vamping in anticipation of such focal moments of circus performance, which don’t arrive frequently enough.
The show’s full potential is only realized once, quite late in the game, in Matias Plaul’s extraordinary monologue about his father, a revolutionary in Argentina who became one of that nation’s “disappeared” in the 1970s. Plaul interweaves speculation about his dad’s last meal with a Chinese pole routine, including a deaddrop manoeuvre that becomes an evocative metaphor for his father’s imagined fate.
Things get interestingly sexy in a final number involving tumbling on the flour-covered floor, but it’s stopped short before its potential is explored.
This is the second 7 Fingers show in as many years that Mirvish Productions has brought to Toronto in the holiday season. Making contemporary circus annual holiday fare is welcome, but this show just isn’t a pièce de resistance.