"Simultaneously frenetic and tedious…The athletic circus acts that are laced throughout the show provide the real entertainment, and make the surrounding book scenes and songs feel even more bogus and synthetic…There’s no denying the breathtaking magic of seeing bodies swim through the air with such apparent weightlessness. Too bad the musical surrounding them feels just as weightless, and far more forgettable."
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“A desperately mediocre (if extravagant) song-and-dance affair tricked out with specialty acts that are far more engaging than the dopey romantic triangle meant to hold our attention...The real fun (and beauty) happens when the hokey dialogue ends and the artists get to show their wares...You leave wishing the creative team had hired proven talents from real Broadway musicals or else, like shrewd moviemakers, left half of the material on the cutting-room floor.”
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“A bizarre mutant entertainment bred from the worst traits of Vegas circus shows and Broadway musicals. If you love either of those things, you’ll hate this...A series of clichés about humanoids accompanied by sounds...The daring acts are performed with evident skill. For Cirque fans there are too few of them. For the rest of us, the problem is that with only one exception they have nothing to do with the ‘narrative.’”
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"Alas, only the circus acts soar, sometimes literally, as the show’s musical and film elements play, at best, dutiful and uninspired parts…The lyrics are frequently lost in mushy diction and unreliable amplification, which is sometimes just as well for rhymes like 'poet' with 'know it.'...Of course, Indigo will still live on the silver screen, even if—as the star of 'Paramour'—that screen is lackluster and only occasionally brightened by the odd tumble or flying act."
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"This is the show with which the Montreal-based global franchise plants its standard on Broadway, promising—and, in spades, delivering—a mashup of '42nd Street' backstage romance, non-stop 'Ziegfeld Follies' and Cirque’s brand of acrobatic arts. It’s as eye-popping as Christmas at Radio City, if not quite as intimate or touching...Audiences may wonder why that annoying story kept stopping the action dead in its computer-assisted tracks...We’ve come for the visuals."
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"Cirque du Soleil’s first-ever Broadway spectacle boasts high-flying aerialists and acrobatic flippers — but the show still flops...Disposable songs, a schizophrenic tone and nonsensical scenes don't help matters. This hapless hybrid of Cirque and the Great White Way does something unexpected: it makes you want to run away and not join the circus."
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"The show has a book (corny), a score of show tunes (mindless), and a cast of singing and dancing actors...More happily, it also has those aerialists, acrobats, jugglers, and tumblers we love—and plenty of spectacle...On occasion, smart connections are made between the stage acts and the movie romance...A jaw-dropping high-wire act performed by the phenomenal twin aerialists is more authentically beautiful and sensually alluring than any of the claptrap going on below.”
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“They seem to have gone out of their way to produce as banal and generic a musical as possible. Featuring atrocious dialogue and forgettable songs, it feels more like a parody than the real thing...The show does have some imaginative, thrilling sequences...But no matter how many times the action spills out over the stage and into the auditorium, it's not enough to draw you into the mess.”
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