Malo and the Moon Maiden, Circus
Venue: Guy Butler Theatre
Next performance: Thursday 3 July 12:00
Review
By Guest Writer Robyn Sassen
Roll up! Roll up! It is time to channel your inner five-year-old to the outrageousness, tawdriness, and madcap sense of possibility that is the circus, and you’ve only three days in which to do it. Janice Honeyman’s quirky work, Malo and the Moon Maiden, takes a hefty dollop of whimsy, a slathering of everything Chagall and a beautiful understanding of magic to make a love story come true.
A tale featuring a clown with heart (Daniel Buckland), a ringmaster with a whip (Yahto Kraft) and a moon with a maiden called Melodia (Claudia Moruzzi) who lives there, it’s about love – love gained, love lost and love gossiped about, that takes you on a celestial journey. The story is not complex, but is peppered with bits of strong man dynamics, fire eating, Honeymanesque puns and jokes and lots of aerial dancing. There’s a wise donkey called Dumbledore (Brian Ngobese) and some nasty pretty girls.
And while the dancing on the stage and in the air is gasp-worthy, the story is mired with platitudes that are easy to grasp and hold onto, and it is the spectacle itself that will grab you by the pulse. Evocative of 20th-century artist Marc Chagall’s circus paintings, there are riffs of colour and allusions to ballerinas standing en pointe on dancing horses. The costumes bring together tiny references to Chicago, Cabaret and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, with a nod to PT Barnum and the rumbling beast that is the circus, with its troubling roots in Victoriana.
No animals are hurt in this production, but a maverick sense of timelessness is conveyed in this olde worlde style show, which skirts from modern LED lights and punctuates all the drum rolls with a tinkling of cymbals as it must. It’s a show that will delight you – and your five-year-old, in all the right ways. Go. Now.
Read more of Robyn’s reviews here.
