Circus in London

Come Alive is a tricky one to review because the question here is less ‘is this a good example of a mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’ and more ‘what the hell are the criteria for a good mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’ Conceived and directed by Simon Hammerstein, the brains behind posh strip club The Box, Come Alive occupies a huge building in Earl’s Court dubbed the Empress Museum, formerly called the Daikin Centre and home to an immersive David Attenborough documentary.   The actual big top-style performance space is comparatively intimate: 700 seats is not tiny, but if an obvious point of comparison is Cirque du Soleil’s annual shows at the Royal Albert Hall, then Come Alive offers similarly skilled acrobats at appreciably closer range – you can see each muscle contort and flex. The rest of the building has been given over to a sort of Greatest Showman-themed mini-mall: overpriced food, overpriced drinks, overpriced fancy dress clobber - but done in high travelling-circus style and there’s a little bit of gratis pre-show acrobatics in one corner of it that’s well worth catching. Anyway. Circus. And the songs from The Greatest Showman. I think one basic point here is that presumably literally every person who has bought a ticket to Come Alive will love the Benj Pasek and Justin Paul tunes from the film already. They’re done well – performed live and with personality, but also very faithfully, ie no drastic sonic...

This review is from 2018. A reworked version of OVO returns for 2026. If you’ve ever seen a Cirque du Soleil show at the Royal Albert Hall, you’ll know exactly what to expect from their latest. 'Ovo' is a dreadful clown comedy, enlivened by a series of jaw-dropping acrobatic interludes. This is my main problem with the devastatingly successful Canadian circus franchise: it has the best performers in the business, but the shows are absolutely chocka with sophomoric gooning around that I’m reasonably certain nobody really asked for. First seen in Montreal in 2009 and making its UK debut here, ‘Ovo’ – created and directed by Deborah Colker – is notionally themed around insects, though this has little bearing on the physicality of the show beyond Liz Vandal’s garish costumes. There is a plot, of sorts, following a pair of dopey flies (I can’t tell you who played them as no performer credits were issued to the press) who fall over, fight and occasionally rub their faces on the breasts of a lady fly. I did not find this particularly endearing. But the prowess of the show’s acrobats is undeniable. A guy juggling four glowing diabolos at the same time pretty much blew my face off; a fella unicycling upside-down on a tightrope made me question whether we were even the same species; and a joyous, trampoline-based finale was, you know, actual, brilliant fun. If only the feats constituted a higher proportion of the clowntastic show, and if only the basic formula didn’t essentially...

In this circus show-slash-house party with a banging ’90s soundtrack, a different random audience member is cast as ‘Sophie’ every night, the unexpected guest of honour at a party that spirals massively out of control.