Cirque Bon Bon @ Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide 18/6/2022

Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust blasts through MC Mario Queen of the Circus’ juggling routine as he bombastically drops a juggling ball at the right moment in the song. This is a visually slick and clever routine to open the show.

Are you ready? Hey, are you ready for this?
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?

As host of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival show, Cirque Bon Bon Mario takes these lyrics from the song to inject some wisecracking repartee, slapstick, unicycling and banana fights between acts that literally have you “hanging on the edge of your seats” at times. At other times the audience is hiding under their seats as Mario slips and slides between rows smelling armpits and scouring for willing and unwilling audience to take front seat while he performs a striptease, or sit on his shoulders while he unicycles, or even to have a banana duel with.

He and a dance troupe provide pleasing segues between acts – and there is a nice mix of acrobatics, contortionists, balance and strength work and a cool roller-skating routine performed by Duo Synergy. The standout act for me was aerialist, Stephen Williams. There is a smooth professionalism and ease that he exudes as he is suspended over the heads of the audience seated at the tables on the stage. And he gave these lucky few an added bonus of a free shower during his bathtub routine. I have seen this routine before at other Fringe shows, but the danger of gripping a slippery, soapy bathtub and doing strength, balance and aerial work always has you thinking about all of those risk assessments that you have to fill out at work.

The songs of Queen provide the musical backbone to the performance – after all the host is called Mario Queen of the circus for a reason. His love of Queen is infectious and he even has the audience standing up and belting out Bohemian Rhapsody with him.

Cirque Bon Bon is a sweet treat full of tricks. It’s a good night out with plenty of eye candy and cloyed gags.

Adelaide Cabaret Festival Review By Bob Becker