Inside ‘Luzia’ you’ll find pure enchantment
Cirque du Soleil is a world unto itself. But first you have to get through a rather drab part of Hartford to enter it.
In many cities, the Cirque du Soleil experience begins while you are still hundreds of yards away from the big top. The massive tent, its pointy tips and rounded roof resembling a storybook castle, can add luster to the landscape. In Cirque du Soleil’s home city of Montreal, for instance, the tent is erected at the end of a pier in the Old Port district. The sun sets shortly before the show begins. It’s a vision of beauty you carry with you into the big top.
Not so in Hartford. The gleaming, imposing Cirque du Soleil big top is jammed up against the highway at Market Street, surrounded by grungy steel and cement and dirt.
The practical advantage is that there’s plenty of parking around, both on the Cirque’s grounds and at nearby pay lots, even on nights when the Yard Goats are playing.
But the tent, acting as the Emerald City does in “The Wizard of Oz,” is a portal. The magic begins once you enter the gates and escape the drab outside world into an extravagant and endlessly enchanting fantasyland of gardens and beaches and torrential rainstorms and deserts with ponds.
And then there’s all the action in the air. Beyond the extraordinary talents of the acrobats, jugglers, trapeze artists and other swinging, leaping, flipping performers, “Luzia” offers amazing special effects and eye-catching designs. A curtain of water