TOTEM, the latest show by Canada's Cirque du Soleil, has been running here in Tokyo since February 3 and is due to finish here on June 26 (with a short break from April 11 to 18).

My partner and I went to see it last night: a balmy spring evening strolling from Daiba station on the Yurikamome Line from Shinbashi through the magical lights of Odaiba.

It was a full house at Big Top, which is a big enough venue to generate a palplaby big buzz among an audience, but compact enough to give even those in the far seats an engaging experience.

This was our first big-stage performance experience in about five years, since we saw the Lion King in Singapore, so we were excited.

In the minutes before the start of the show, outlandishly gotten-up performers mingled with the crowd that was finding its seats, providing on-the-spot entertainment from the moment you entered the space and setting an air of oddball fun.
The performance proper began a minute or two after 7 pm with effusive japes and jollity by a comic pair of guys, mixing a few Japanese phrases - which delighted the audience - with excitable Italianesque remonstrativeness and slapstick physicality. From there on in, it launched into the epic journey through time and the ever greater dreams and ambitions of the human race.

TOTEM is a show themed on human evolution, and makes especial use of the technological gaps between what were to become humans (i.e., monkeys), primitive humans, today's humans, and humans as imagine...