Madam Zingara, that intoxicating feast for the senses, has returned, and I, against my better instincts, went to see her. Why, you might ask, was I reluctant? Well, think of me as a little fly and the Madam as a beautiful spider with a very sticky web.
La Dolce Royal, Cape Town’s latest exercise in velvet absurdity, is set in a spiegeltent so lavish it’s a wonder that the Louvre heist thieves didn’t try to steal it from right above our heads during the show.
From the moment you step inside, you know decorum has been politely ejected through the tent flap: mirrors, lights, feathers and a whiff of incense that makes you wonder if you’ve eaten a magic mushroom or whether hallucinatory characters are part of the ticket (they are).
Craig Leo, ever the conjurer, with co-director Valentina Leo and their circus of virtuosos, has built a theatre that ambushes the senses. The Weeping Woman wails grief that’s theatrically overdone. The Oracle, a fractured goddess, swallows your handwritten prayers with a grim benevolence. I scribbled a note and tucked it into her skirt. They read out my hopes and dreams at the interval.
The acts are absurd and intriguing: a contortionist in a sequin body suit, folding like an origami snake, twins defying gravity, aerialists dangling – announcing that physics isn’t welcome in this heady velvet dreamscape. A feathered palm balance of foot-long sticks left me concurring with the strange circus being dressed in a sparkling top hat, tails and fishnets who’d joined our table. He said: “This is the most impressive thing you’ve ever seen.”
Meanwhile, the Clorettes sing R&B and catchy pop tunes in sorbet coloured, 50s-style dresses, Axel Perez, from the bright lights of Vegas, performs the Rola Bola - an amazing circus act balancing on a board on top of ever increasing layers of cylinders while we eat perfectly tender fillet steak drenched in chocolate sauce.
By the end, I was coated in glitter, sozzled in tequila, faintly dazed, doused in one-hit wonders and undeniably impressed by what logic-defying feats can be achieved with about ten years or so of dedicated circus practice. La Dolce Royal isn’t a show — it’s a coup against the mundane, a riotous reminder that wonder can be summoned at will by performers and kinkers in silk, feathers and a spiegeltent that laughs at gravity.
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