Theatre in Review: Totem (Citi Field)Totem is the latest collaboration between Cirque du Soleil (CDS) and the director Robert Lepage, an alliance that brought you a little thing called KÀ. Unlike that Las Vegas mega-spectacle, Totem is a typical Cirque touring tent show, a fast, light-on-its-feet parade of thrills that leaves you amused rather than stunned into submission. In my view, the CDS Vegas extravaganzas, for all their technical innovations, have grown increasingly overbearing, to the point where the fun has been crushed out of them by the sheer tonnage of their production designs. Refreshingly free of pretension, Totem never forgets that it is, well, a circus. Not that you don't have to put up with the usual CDS nonsense. The press release says that Totem is "inspired by many founding myths" and "illustrates, through a visual and acrobatic language, the evolutionary progress of species." On the bright side, this allows for an amusing tableau, riffing off the famous image of the evolution of Man, showing humanity's development from ape to businessman with a cell phone. On the downside, this means inexplicable appearances by simians, Mayans, Native Americans, and other indigenous peoples, occasionally accompanied by a cadre of lab-coated scientists and a bearded fellow that I felt certain was supposed to be Charles Darwin, until he turned out to be a juggler. As CDS touring shows go, Totem occupies a position firmly in the middle; it's a little short on the kind of gasp-inducing act that is the troupe's trademark, and the acts are ordered oddly, ruling out any sense of mounting excitement. Among the biggest applause-getters are the so-called Crystal Ladies (Marina and Svetlana Tsodikova), who balance large spinning swatches of glittery fabric; the act known as Unicycles and Bowls, featuring a quintet of young ladies (Bai Xiangjie, Su Rina, Wang Xue, Yang Jie, and Zhang Jie) who traverse the stage on high-rise unicycles tossing bowls with their feet and catching them with their heads; and an astonishing roller-skate pas de deux staged on a tiny 1.8m diameter platform, performed by Massimiliano Medini and Denise Garcia-Sorta. My favorite -- if only for its novelty -- is Manipulation, featuring the juggler Greg Kennedy standing in an enormous transparent cone, doing remarkably agile things with a set of little balls filled with color-changing LEDs. The set design, by Carl Fillion, the man behind that notorious Valhalla Machine of the Metropolitan Opera's Ring Cycle (also directed by Lepage), features a circular stage abutted by a raked deck that serves as a surface for the astonishing projections (of oceans, beaches, underwater life, and an erupting volcano) by image content designer Pedro Pires. Built into the raked deck is an articulating bridge that rises up and curls backward; the undercarriage of the bridge is heavily mirrored, a fact that the lighting designer Étienne Boucher, uses to his advantage. (Boucher, whose work is unfailingly beautiful throughout, also makes good use of the Crystal Man (David Resnick), a kind of human mirrorball who is flown in from time to time.) Kym Barrett's costumes are colorful, exotic, and revealing, in various combinations. Jacques Boucher's sound design is one of the best Cirque has enjoyed for some time, allowing for greater enjoyment of the typically New Age score, by Guy Dubuc and Marc Lessard, who are collectively known as Bob & Bill. Yes, the usual terrible clowns are onboard, although this time they're a little less terrible, and they don't spend all their time looking for audience members to humiliate. But overall, this is one of the pacier and more pleasant CDS shows to hit New York in some time, especially if you've grown weary of the troupe's overreaching themes and production values. It would be a fine way of introducing the child in your life to Cirque du Soleil's distinctive brand of circus entertainment.--David Barbour 
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