Cirque du Soleil's Delirium: meh

We went to see Cirque du Soleil's show Delirium, now in Helsinki on their tour of Europe, yesterday. It was the first time I've seen any of their shows live. It wasn't exactly bad, but not what I was hoping for. The most important part seemed to be the music and the video stuff, and the acrobatics were a bit of an extra. Trouble is, the acrobatics were what we went there to see.

The music was an A-Z of genres with no carrying theme, going from rock with guitar heroics to Africa flavoured world fusion to soul to pop to salsa to tango. And few of the songs were all that great, either, basically sounding like filler tracks on a pretty ok album. A different album in each case, of course.

The video show was amazing, mostly computer generated and in all cases heavily processed, with two big screens on each side of the stage, one behind it and a translucent one part of the time in front of it.

And occasionally somewhere there were a few acrobats. They were mostly extremely impressive, too. At least when you could see and concentrate on them. Too often, though, even if they were there, there was the huge A/V show going on all around them, drowning them with its volume, both in terms of sound and screen area. And as if that wasn't enough, sometimes they had the translucent screen in front of the stage showing water or something, forcing you to squint to see the people who you thought were supposed to be the most important part of the whole experience.

According to the official web site, "For the first time Cirque du Soleil created a show where melodies, musicians and singers are the driving force". I guess I'll just have to keep that it mind when deciding which show to go see next time.