Queen Elizabeth Park until December 31, 2018
Tickets from $119 at baciorosso.com/tickets
Posted November 9, 2018
Let Bacio Rosso roll off the tongue and give it your best Italian inflection – roll those Rs. BA-cho RRROW-so (The Kiss of Red). The show – billed as a Gourmet Cabaret Cirque – takes place in an antique Spiegeltent, a large traveling tent handmade of wood and canvas. Inside, the tent is draped in thousands of meters of red velvet and silk, gold trim and festooned with hundreds of beveled mirrors (spiegel in German). It’s like walking into the heart of a pre-20th century European cabaret and no wonder: Spiegeltents – also known as Magic Mirror Tents or Mirrored Palaces – go back to the 1880s in Flanders, Belgium where they were used as travelling dancehalls.
Bacio Rosso guests are ushered into a lavishly decorated outer tent – red velvet and more red velvet, a gleaming bar, scarlet feather boas, gold braid and tassels and mirrors – before being ushered into the much larger tent beyond the curtains. According to tradition, every Spiegeltent is given a name. Coming all the way from Belgium, the one in Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Park is called Magic Cristal.
All that Old World glitz and glam comes at you even before the show and the four-course meal prepared by Chef Adam Pegg of La Quercia. At this point you might wish you had put on your party duds, worn a fascinator or a silk top hat. Put on the Ritz, in other words.
Tables, mostly seating eight diners, surround a small ‘stage’ – a meter-high circle about three meters in diameter. A small space but a very big show.
Hosts (in white shirts, black trousers and top hats) and hostesses (in black and red bustiers, frou-frou skirts and net stockings) immediately greet you and take you to your assigned table. Combo De Lux, a five-piece band, is already playing to beat the band and filling the tent with an eclectic mix of music. From the program notes: “With the reinvention of martini lounge music, the sixties French chanson, Italian film soundtracks, Latin cha cha cha, bop-jazz and Brazilian bossa nova, the result is a distinctive groove that is Combo De Lux.” Appetizers quickly appear, carried aloft at a trot by those dozens and dozens of host and hostesses.
And this is just a prelude to the evening!
Gorgeous New York-based cabaret star Lady Rizo (aka Amelia Zirin-Brown) emcees Bacio Rosso, providing linkage between acts and generally wowing everyone with her vivacity and smoky voice, a voice “coming from her ovaries”, says she. There’s a story of sort but, much like Cirque du Soleil, it’s sort of obscure and of little consequence. But the five acts plus clowning – provided mostly by Vancouver’s own Colin Heath of Leaky Heaven Circus and The Number 14 fame – rank right up there with C du S’s shows: all international medal-winning performers.
Erika Nguyen opens the show on the aerial hoop that drops down through the big top to the stage. She’s all sparkle and dazzle – a twirling, dizzying human corkscrew at her most energetic; surreally beautiful in the quiet moments.
Kevin Kent, a physical and improvisational performer, doubles as a fanatic butterfly hunter and an outrageous, sexy cross-dresser in feathers and net.
Jimmy Gonzalez, who up to this point has been a hapless waiter, stumbling around the set, turns out to be a spectacular juggler. What he does with a lump of clay is show stopping – even spiritual, if you’re willing to go there and if you think of mankind being formed from clay.
Oliver and Cassie, a dynamic trapeze duo, illustrate the beauty and power of the human body in a show of heart-stopping aerials and Dima Shine, a hand-balancing artist with thirty gold medals to his credit, dazzles with his body-beautiful strength and precision. Canadian magician Shawn Farquhar, winner of the highest award in magic, the Grand Prix World Champion of Magic in Beijing, entertains with magic tricks.
My favourite, though, was Ann Bernard who, as Anita, is a sort of Olive Oyl character: sort of skinny with her hair pulled back into a tight little bun, long pencil skirt and white runners. Sometimes she leads the band, sometimes she’s comedic filler but when she emerged with her boleadoras (two stones on two ropes and dating back to an ancient Argentinian hunting tool), she blew me away. Her combination of dance, percussion, boleadoras and clowning was fantastic. Boleadoras performers are traditionally men and, like flamenco dancers, full of machismo and swagger. Bernard, on the other hand, projects surprise and astonishment – often looking like the boleadoras are getting away on her and are twirling her not the other way around. Her performance is not only spectacular but also funny – a tour de force.
The food? Good but with 350 people to feed, a challenge to deliver hot. Choice of entrees is made when tickets are purchased: Rosticciata di Manzo (slow roasted beef), Pollo in Umido (braised chicken) or Polenta con Funghi (polenta with mushrooms). It’s part of the entertainment watching the dozens of servers – including, very democratically, the ‘stars’ – arriving from the corners of the tent, plates held high, virtually at a quick trot in long lines from the corners of the Magic Cristal.
Bacio Rosso is tremendously entertaining, a really fun night out. Prices start at $119 and top out at $239 and include dinner and the show; drinks are extra.
It’s as much an experience as a show. I can imagine it taking off with friends booking whole tables and dressing up. It has a Midnight in Paris feel; you might want to dress up as Salvador Dali or Ernest Hemingway. Go Roaring Twenties or Ratskeller barmaid. Unleash your imagination; go crazy.
No-Funcouver? Not at Bacio Rosso. Run away. Join the circus.