You’d have to be some sort of curmudgeon to not enjoy Absinthe – excellent circus married to scabrous and utterly politically unsound comedy, performed perfectly in an atmospherically evocative Spiegeltent. Absinthe comes from Spiegelworld, the same lot that brought us Empire in the Spiegeltent on the rooftop of Crown Casino, so you get slick, you get polished and you get world class acts. The show completely owns the pervy element of the circus meets cabaret meets vaudeville genre which makes for a lot of fun. Host Gazillionaire(who we presume is former Cirque du Soleil clown Voki Kalfayanand) and his side-kick Penny Pibbets (also presumably Anais Thomassian) make sure they offend pretty much everyone, and make good use of some good sorts from the audience.
The circus acts include some stunning balancing on chairs, by Oleksandr Volohdin as an opening treat, Australian performer Karla Tonkich does a green fairy number singing about the aperitif itself, the Lost Souls quartet are stunning strong men from the Ukraine, also there’s another strong man duo featuring Polish acrobat Michal Tomasz Nowosadko, a man with a musculatory system so defined that to watch him is like looking at a page of Gray’s anatomy. The night features a very funny piss-take of the wholesome earnestness of the sorts of acts you might see in a family friendly Cirque de Soleil show. Belarus strong men Aliaksandr Yurkaveats and Andrew Sizonenko are stunning, Maika Isogawa and Jacob Oberman perform a romantic aerial ballet in a duo straps routine, Swedish performer Angie Sylvia appears twice, once in a fire-eating act and the other with a giant balloon doing a turn to Moon River. We get a bit of girl on girl action with an aerial hoop routine, and the gob-smacking tightrope routine by a trio called the Frat Pack. The lineup varies as Absinthe tours so we can’t be sure of naming everybody but excellence is well-assured.
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
