ECHO: A CUBE WITH BIG DREAMS
IN A SHOW STILL FINDING ITS SHAPE
It opens with a cube. Glowing, two stories tall, and unmistakably the star of the show, this bold architectural gesture doesn’t just set the tone; it declares intent. ECHO arrives with a whiff of manifesto, promising reinvention, disruption, a new kind of magic wrung from air and light. But the charge fades. The production begins in the register of rupture and ends in careful elegance. Something wild wants to happen. It doesn’t.
The cube, first imagined by Es Devlin (the renowned set designer behind Adele’s Vegas residency and Tony Award-winning work on The Lehman Trilogy) before her dismissal as director and executed under Cirque veteran Mukhtar Omar Sharif Mukhtar, should’ve been a fulcrum. It’s a screen, a scaffold, a rotating shrine. It glows, tilts, breathes. What it doesn’t do is transform. For all its kinetic intelligence, it never accrues meaning. It moves, but it doesn’t move us. It’s architecture mistaken for metaphor.
That hollow core reverberates outward. ECHO is rigorously composed and immaculately rehearsed, but its surfaces refuse to crack. Cirque at its best weaponizes contradiction; beauty stalked by danger, awe undercut by slapstick, emotion that pivots on a gasp. Here, those gears don’t grind. There’s no fire. No silk. No sense that something, anything, might fall. Acrobatics glide forward like clockwork. Images stack neatly, too neatly, until they begin to blur.
A blue-skinned girl and her matching dog drift through this visual essay. Paper creatures rise and vanish. There’s scaffolding for a story but nothing urgent pulsing beneath it. Cirque has always trafficked in emotional logic rather than plot, but here the abstraction lifts off and never circles back. The characters don’t change or seem changed. The cube spins. The world shifts. Everyone remains untouched. Just when the spectacle risks dissolving into sheer design, the show remembers its body—its weight, its muscle, its pulse. A few sequences pierce the glass. Robel Weldemikael and Meareg Mehar juggle with their feet, and for a moment, finally, something vibrates. Their precision has teeth. Later, Clément Malin and Caio Sorana turn cardboard boxes into a whispered duel. The silence carries weight. These scenes don’t shout; they hum. And in that hum, the show briefly wakes up.
The double slackwire act that opens the second half offers another glimpse of what ECHO could be. Two performers balance on slack lines suspended one above the other, creating what the program calls “a line between life and death.” Here, finally, is genuine peril; not manufactured through pyrotechnics or machinery, but earned through human vulnerability. The act teeters on genuine risk, and for those precious minutes, the audience leans forward rather than settling back.
Even more arresting are the Fireflies, Penelope Elena Scheidler and Charlotte O’Sullivan in Cirque’s first dual hair-hanging act, suspended by nothing but their own hair as they weave through the air in mirror formations. As Scheidler explains, they arrive “in the moment where Future realizes there is nothing left and it’s dark. We come in and bring light and beauty.” It’s a literalization that should feel heavy-handed, but their ethereal precision transcends the obvious symbolism. What makes it remarkable isn’t just the technical achievement—hair distributed and knotted to bear their full weight—but how they’ve reimagined an ancient discipline until it feels newly discovered. Here, the show’s title finally makes sense: these are echoes of circuses past, reverberating into something that feels both timeless and immediate.
The live music, by Jade Pybus, Andy Theakstone, and Hugo Montecristo, works in echo loops: swelling, dissolving, rising again. It’s immersive, even seductive, but holds back from climax. A two-story high humanoid puppet arrives with theater-kid fanfare. It’s all gesture, no possession. The motions are flawless. The soul is missing.
Eventually, the central question, the one ECHO seems afraid to ask, begins to whisper. If this is a show about transformation, where is the change? We see images of metamorphosis, sure, but none that feel lived in. The show gestures at risk while playing it safe. The vocabulary is new, but the sentences are familiar. The cube turns, the lights shift, and still everything stays where it was.
For newcomers, the appeal will register: polished design, expert performers, Cirque’s patented aesthetic glow. But for anyone who’s tasted the haunted melancholy of Quidam, or the feral heat of Luzia, ECHO might land as a sketchbook. Beautiful, but hesitant. Luzia left me uplifted and full of wonder. ECHO left me unmoved, scanning for the exit lights. The show circles around its thesis without leaping into it.
The talent is undeniable. The design is meticulous. What’s missing is rupture, mystery, the moment when the show forgets itself and something raw breaks through. Cirque knows how to build a world. This time, it forgot to let anything unexpected live inside it.
photos by Jean-François Savaria
costumes by Nicolas Vaudelet
ECHO
Cirque du Soleil
international tour
Under the Big Top, 24155 Laguna Hills Mall, CA (free parking)
125 min including 25 min intermission
ends in Laguna Hills on Jun 29, 2025
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit ECHO
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
