While most circus performances rely on feats of physicality to draw in the audience, the talented boys from Head First Acrobats have crafted their show around a science fiction theme where three mad-cap scientists from the Elixir Corporation are trying to find the elixir of life – testing their creations on themselves.
In between their laboratory visits, the boys dazzle the audience with displays of extreme strength and agility pausing only to down another potion and wait for its effect. As the potions kick in, a digital voiceover provides the results of each concoction and the effect it has had on the scientists who get more and more reckless with each batch.
Props such as laboratory test tubes filled with coloured liquid double as juggling implements and highlight the versatility of the three performers who not only use their highly toned bodies to carry out amazing routines, they also compete for the attention of the audience, trying their best to outdo each other.
By combining traditional slapstick and clowning routines with theatre, circus arts, inventive staging and even breakdancing, the gifted trio have created a fresh and zany take on the standard circus show. But don’t fear, all your favourite routines are there including hand-to-hand, balance ladder, Washington trapeze and a superb Cyr wheel act undertaken by a seriously inebriated scientist.
Thomas, Cal, and Rowan hold the show together with true comedic timing and their capacity to engage with the audience is outstanding. The music, lighting and effects are also perfectly timed and add another dimension to an already multidimensional production. 'Elixir' succeeds on many levels; it is clever, sassy, funny, astonishingly masculine (yet delightfully playful) and even sexually ambivalent – all at the same time.
Not many boys will don suspenders and stockings and leopard skin underwear to get a laugh but these brave lads don’t care and they hold the audience in the palm of their hands with their crazy antics.
'Elixir' is certainly different, and even the most jaded spectator will find plenty to like in this hugely entertaining, thoroughly enjoyable, and slightly wacky circus show.
★★★★★
