Cirque du Soleil's innovation on the circus form has been to replace the freaks of yore with freakish talent.
There's more than a hint of that history in "Alegria," which opened Wednesday in a return engagement at the yawning Target Center. A hunchback haunts the colorful stage, for example, and many of the characters who make up the show's background wear freakish masks.
But "Alegria" (the word means joy in Spanish) elicits its oohs and aahs with displays of extreme dexterity and flexibility combined with strength and artistic flourishes.
The lineup at Target Center includes Russian performer Maria Silaeva, who combines ballet with hula-hooping; bungee-rope flying man Alexander Dobrynin; and two Mongolian contortionists who do a synchronized act in which they seem to have one (very bendy) body between them.
Elastic performers Baasansuren Enkhbaatar and Ganchimeg Tumurbaatar bend and twist and put their heads in places where you can't help but have a guttural response, even if the choreography that they execute is the same one used by contortionists in other Cirque shows.
They were impressive, as were the gymnastic team tumbling on the trampoline, the aerial fliers on the high bar and knife-fire dancers Micah Naruo & Maui Ayachi-Sumeo.
The show's artistry never fails to impress, but much of the energy gets lost under the big dome of Target Center. If you go, you might want to bring binoculars since the venue is much larger and less intimate than the giant tent at the site of the current Guthrie Theater where the show first played in 2002.
Adding to the diffuse energy is the fact that the interludes between the nine main acts in "Alegria" go on for far too long. The divertissements by Canadian clowns Jesse Buck and Aron De Casmaker, as funny as some of their bits were, became filler.
