Heads Up

The clowns come out first. They appear in a spot of light in the audience, flitting among the patrons who are still looking for seats. One clown points and silently guffaws at a lady who looks to be toting several glasses of wine. Another dusts off the head of a child sipping soda. But Cirque du Soleil's production of Varekai is not just about the silly shenanigans of funny pranksters. As with all the Canadian company's shows that have traveled through Houston, Varekai combines dizzying circus acts with a loosely constructed story. The fantastically imagined world has taken shape in a circus tent pitched in a quiet corner of one of Reliant Stadium's parking lots. Enter the canvas flaps and be amazed.

Once the lights turn to the ringed stage, wondrous beings appear and wander through designer Stéphane Roy's mazelike set. A forest of slender, tall rods of cane serves as backdrop for the show, and a canelike catwalk spirals up to the dizzying top of the tent. Crawling in from every direction, strange creatures begin to populate the stage. There's composer Violaine Corradi's otherworldly music, and the sounds of birds and insects flitting and singing around the tent. Nol van Genuchten's lighting infuses the stage with the dappled glow of morning, and the whole place becomes a forgotten fairy-land grove.

Dressed in Eiko Ishioka's fantastic costumes, the performers fill the stage. The menagerie of beings is the sort that might come from the most fabulous childhood dream. Some are covered with rubbery, colorful spines; one can jump several feet into the air; some have big blobs of color poking out from their heads like big petunias.

A strange and funny fellow appears with a contraption for catching and transforming the ugly sounds of our modern world. Car engines and ringing cell phones have no place here. He grabs those obnoxious noises and puts them through his ancient-looking machine, and then out come the lovely sounds of birds chirping -- in other words, now is the time to leave the workaday life of modernity behind and enter the almost mystical world of Varekai.

One of the most astonishing acts is also the one most integrated into the story of the show. According to press materials, Varekai means " 'wherever' in the Romany language of the gypsies." And so this show is a sort of homage to the wanderer, who appears in the shape of an Icarus-like being who falls from the sky dressed in angel-white and long wings. Once he lands, he loses his wings, and in an act called "The Flight of Icarus" he must work his way out of a creamy-white net that holds him captive. Performer Anton Chelnokov is breathtaking to watch. The net flies high into the air as he twirls and spins, held up with only the power of his arms. He and the net make gorgeous kitelike shapes that hang high above the heads of the hushed crowd. The act is more than amazing; there's something emotionally moving in the powerful struggle between Chelnokov and the net.

Other acts -- such as "Water Meteors," performed by child acrobats who twirl and fling long ropes with metal disks attached to them in the air, or "Icarian Games," performed by a group of acrobats who catapult off and then land on top of one another's bodies -- amaze simply because they look so impossibly difficult and dangerous.

The clowns (Jordi Deambulants and Joanna Holden) reappear throughout the show. In one scene, they play bad magicians taunting each other. Another memorable scene features the male clown as a lounge singer. Dressed in a baby-blue suit and standing in a single spot of light, he lip-syncs to a sexy French tune. "Don't leave me," he croons, but the spotlight keeps moving and he ends up having to chase the light if he wants to stay in it. The scene is one of the funniest clown acts Cirque du Soleil has ever created.

Directed by Dominic Champagne, the show manages to weave its subtle story about the wanderer in and out of the circus acts in a fairly successful way, though it does get lost somewhere in the middle. But later, the wanderer reappears for an ending that owes a great deal to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. It is beautiful.

This circus provides a story with characters that infuse the acrobats and jugglers with an almost mystical energy. The show takes us to another world that anyone with an imagination would love to inhabit, if only for one night.