Icarus in Wonderland Cirque du Soleil melds myth and circus BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Varekai Written and directed by Dominic Champagne. Guide Guy Laliberté. Director of creation Andrew Watson. Set by Stéphane Roy. Costumes by Eiko Ishioka. Music by Violaine Corradi. Choreography by Michael Montanaro and Bill Shannon. Rigging by Jaque Paquin. Lighting by Nol Van Genuchten. Sound by François Bergeron. Projections by Francis Laporte. Clown acts by Cal McCrystal. Aerial acts by André Simard. Conductor Michel Cyr. With Anton Chelnokov, Irina Naumenko, Rodrigue Proteau, Gordon White, Isabelle Corradi, Craig Jennings, and others. Presented by Cirque du Soleil at Suffolk Downs through September 5.

Cirque du Soleil’s shows are not so much variations on a theme as variations on a style: surreal, spectacular, vaguely sinister, and deafening. Each new creation gets its own theme; Varekai, the latest Cirque creation, which debuted in 2002 and is now on North American tour, takes its inspiration from the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on wings of wax and feathers and crashed into the sea. Not much of a show in that, so in Varekai, Icarus plummets not into the briny but into a highly original world where a magical forest hovers on the summit of a volcano, flora and fauna are imaginatively represented, and every second weirdo is an acrobat or an aerialist. Cirque diehards will recognize the milieu: one sheltered under a Big Top — oops, Grand Chapiteau — where phantasmagoria meets Vegas.

Cirque du Soleil is itself an amazing story — and one that’s more coherent than the plot of Varekai. Twenty years ago, the founders of the troupe were stilt-walking buskers in Montreal. Now Cirque is a cottage entertainment industry juggling eight shows, including two parked in Las Vegas and one resident at Disney World in Orlando. To my mind, the earlier creations were more Fellini-esque and delicate. The more recent ones to pass through Boston — Dralion and now Varekai — bear distinct markings of the long-time Nevada address, though each offers, in addition to unusual displays of circus skill, moments of breathtaking, exquisite simplicity. In the first act of Varekai, it comes early, in "Flight of Icarus," in which the unfortunate flier (the graceful Anton Chelnokov), having crashed, is borne upward in a hammock-like cocoon and proceeds to break free of it, utilizing the unfurled rope chrysalis as the setting for a beautiful aerial ballet of rising and falling, climbing and surrender.

Plot is hardly the point of a show that more than once takes away your breath — which then returns to utter, "Who handles these folks’ workman’s comp?" But as near as I can figure the story line of Varekai, the grounded Icarus spends his time in the magic kingdom being awed, taunted by wing stealers, and, finally, seduced by an amazing dancer/contortionist, Irina Naumenko, who clad in a flesh body stocking decorated with glitter completely rearranges her body parts while balancing on canes. Her work is both beautiful and eye-popping; I was particularly astonished by the moment in which her butt appears to be balanced atop her head.

Most of the most jaw-dropping acts occur after intermission, though the "Triple Trapeze" — in which artists Helen Ball, Cinthia Beranek, Juliana Coutinho, and Sophie Olfield, clad in shiny, fish-like blue-green, form poetic shapes dangling from a trapeze and one another — is suppler and more striking than most swinging-trapeze acts. In the second act, we get the muscular and gorgeous "Aerial Straps" of Andrew and Kevin Atherton, twin hunks in half-leotards and upwardly mobile greased coiffures who, to Piazzolla-like fiddling, make bold, conjoined shapes in the air. Then there’s the finale: a "Russian Swings" act about which the most amazing feature is that, with its military-precision flinging through the air of red-and-yellow-clad bodies, it doesn’t kill someone nightly.

I wish there were more of the mystery that characterized earlier Cirque shows (especially Alegría) in Varekai. But there’s bedazzlement aplenty. The costumes by Eiko Ishioka evoke an interspecies world in which many of the tumbling, gymnastic denizens are Piscean or plantlike. (Human flowers actually seem to bloom in the second-act opening.) The clown acts aren’t very funny, but my biggest carp with the show, as with its Cirque predecessors, is that the music — in this case by Violaine Corradi, with klezmer and Hawaiian fillips, choral chant, and a somber accompaniment to the "Handbalancing on Canes" by Naumenko — is detrimentally over-miked. The amplification destroys the sound of the singers (Isabelle Corradi and Craig Jennings) and turns their multi-lingual lyrics to mush. "Varekai" is said to be the word for "wherever" in the Romany language of European Gypsies. Sure it doesn’t mean loud?