A circus show not for the children

Empire Spiegelworld
Wynyard Quarter, Auckland Waterfront
January 6 - February 15

Cirque du Soleil style shows are great entertainment for the family but there are some adult-rated ones that are definitely not for the children. 

Next year’s Auckland Arts Festival will be having a couple of the family friendly Cirque styled shows but Empire will be first off the blocks in early January. It’s a show with lots of sex, comedy, burlesque and circus-style showstoppers. It mixes up all the entertainment genres and like Cirque productions has no real storyline but offers sexy, slick performers who almost and occasionally do burst out of the stage and into the audience.

Performing to a soundtrack of chart-busting pop numbers and in an intimate space that puts the audience up close to the action, the cast offers up a production that’s often inane but always slick, sexy but incredibly irreverent,. “Empire” dissolves the boundaries between circus, cabaret, variety and burlesque, reinventing the genres for a 21st century audience. The show had its world premiere season in New York City during the summer of 2012, where it was the first tented show ever seen in Times Square.

The 700-seat antique Spiegeltent, complete with bevelled mirrors, plus velvet-upholstered seating booths, speak-easy style bar and the most intimate stage in town, will host the most jaw-dropping and outrageous night out you’ll experience this year. The show is a 90-minute theatrobatic adventure performed by international talent with the MCs, Oscar and Fanny, steering the show while an eccentric cast of characters help Oscar rebuild his empire; the seductive Gorilla Girls from Ukraine form perfectly balanced pyramids on top of each other; the Ethiopian foot juggler Black Flintstone throws and impossibly catches his brother Big Mac Boy on his feet.

Other performers include the French duo, Lime Green Lady and Carrot Man who beautifully and sensuously balance each other, the Half Naked Asian Dude Wearing Pigtails from Japan is the world champion wheelmaster, rolling dangerously past the audience;

Miss A in a Bubble contorts gracefully inside an aerial sphere and the 3D Graffiti Guy from Canada creates amazing structures, anchored entirely on a feather. 

Miss Purple is the resident vocalist and is backed by the Viking of 6th Avenue, Moondog.

To create Empire, Spiegelword impressario Ross Mollison assembled a stellar Australian creative team of director Terence O’Connell (numerous Australian comedy greats at The Last Laugh in Melbourne through to Circus Oz), choreographer John "Cha Cha" O’Connell (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby), designer Angus Strathie (Academy Award for Moulin Rouge) and lighting designer Martin Kinnane (Sydney New Year’s Eve, Love Loss & What I Wore).

The New Zealand tour of Empire follows a spring run in Tokyo where each night the cast was met with standing ovations. In Australian the show was given a “10/10” by the Sun Herald, and described as “taking the audience by storm” in the Sydney Morning Herald.  

The show opened in Christchurch a few weeks ago and the Press said of the show “Think post-war France, the underground jazz clubs of a Great Gatsby era, vaudeville and cabaret.

Women in corsets and suspenders strut around provocatively and the kooky performers are already in show mode.

A man rubs a carrot up my friend's leg while a strange Asian man asks an audience member to throw a tennis ball down his pants. Empire is unlike anything I've ever seen before. .. a stunning tour de force that combines burlesque, gravity-defying stunts, dance, lights, bubbles, live music and bucketloads of talent. The electric, sassy circus antics are spliced with moments of mesmerising beauty and physically impossible acts."