Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Family scrambles to travel together on ‘Ovo’ tour
The performers aren’t the only ones arriving when the newest Cirque Du Soleil show, “Ovo,” brings its bug-love story to South Florida this month.
Several families of “Ovo” cast and crew are coming along for the ride, including the wife and son of Nathan Lerohl, a bass player and the show’s bandleader.
Lerohl said “Ovo” is the most kidfriendly Cirque show he has seen. “This is a great show for families,” he said. “For one thing, it’s about bugs, so what little kid doesn’t like bugs? Bugs are super cool for kids.
“And also, there’s a big wall that serves as part of the set with these huge projections and … they function as scene changes. Those projections
are very colorful, full of flowers, full of different backgrounds depending on which type of bug is doing the act.”
“Ovo” is at the BB&T Center in Sunrise through July 23 and the AmericanAirlines Arena in Miami July 28-30.
Lerohl joined Cirque Du Soleil on the big top show “Corteo,” but on this tour, things are different: Lerohl is now a father, and his wife and 20-month-old son, James, are traveling with him.
Lerohl met his wife, Lorena Senna, in Brazil through “Corteo;” she was working to promote the show.
Traveling with a baby is “a pretty heavy commitment on her part,” Lerohl said. “It’s not very easy.”
When “Ovo” first started touring, his wife and son would travel separately from Lerohl and the rest of the “Ovo” crew, but the challenges of getting from city to city proved too great. “So we ended up buying a car, and now we’ve been kind of doing this giant road trip all over the U.S.,” Lerohl said.
The show takes time to get set up in a new arena, “so we always we try to find things to do and find things to see on the way.”
Right now, he said, James is in a zoo phase, so they seek out zoos and children’s museums. “Those are the places we like to go to the most because, for one, they are usually big, open areas, and being in a hotel room is not a big, open area. And so, while we do travel with a bunch of his toys as much as we can and a little play area, we try to take advantage of those bigger spaces. And also for him to be with other kids and run around and be messy and be loud and do his thing.”
When traveling, there are several things the family cannot live without, such as a slow cooker and and flash cards to play with James in the car.
Also, “no matter how big or small the hotel room is, there’s this thing that we always break out, which is this collapsible tent/play area with about 300 plastic balls,” Lerohl said. “It has two ends, one’s a square and one’s a triangle, and then there’s this tube, like a crawl-through tube in the middle. And it folds up into nothing, into something not much bigger than a purse. It’s fantastic.”
Although their location is constantly changing, Lerohl and his wife try to keep some things consistent for their son. “We try our best to provide a routine as much as possible, because it’s important for him to expect things at certain times: bath time, dinner time, things like that,” he said.
James, who was born in Panama, has three passports: Brazilian, Panamanian and American. He’s been to Ecuador and about 50 U.S. cities, his father said. But he’s about to get even more well-traveled.
“We’ll be in the U.S. until September, and then from that point we go into Europe,” Lerohl said. “That’s when we’ll face a whole set of logistic challenges as to how we’re going to make this work and how we’re going to do it. There’s visas to think about, there’s lots of things like that.”
The family has already faced challenges on the road, such as when Lerohl went to Canada and his wife could not go because she was in the process of getting her green card. “It can be quite a challenge sometimes,” he said. “But there’s not much of a choice.”
Although Lerohl plays electric bass and upright bass, his son hasn’t taken up an instrument yet. “He does a lot of singing and a lot of drumming, but mostly he’s a dancer,” he said.
That dancing comes out when James watches the Cirque show, which has “very catchy, really familiar melodies,” Lerohl said.
He said his son has seen “Ovo” probably eight times, and his favorite part is the finale.
“The finale is all a trample wall act, and it has this very active, electro music with a lot of percussion and stuff, and this is the moment in the show where he’s probably the hardest to contain.”