Deborah Colker's bug-world show has been on the road since 2009, survived the collapse of the big-top model and a two-year shutdown, and in 2026 is Cirque du Soleil's busiest touring title — rebuilt in late 2024 and selling out the Royal Albert Hall hard enough to force an extension.

An egg, a fly and a Brazilian choreographer

OVO opened under the Grand Chapiteau in Montréal on 23 April 2009 as Cirque du Soleil's twenty-fifth production, mounted for the company's twenty-fifth anniversary. It was written, directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker, the Rio de Janeiro dancer and theatre director who became the first woman to direct a Cirque show. Her brief was not a narrative so much as an ecosystem: ovo is Portuguese for egg, and the egg is the object around which the whole thing turns.

Colker built the piece out of insect movement rather than circus archetypes. Ants juggle fruit with their feet, crickets bounce off a vertical wall, a spider works a slackwire, fireflies spin diabolos in the dark. The thread holding it together is slender by design — a travelling fly arrives carrying a mysterious egg, falls for a ladybug, and is obstructed by Master Flipo, the colony's self-important elder.

The design team came largely from Brazil and has stayed with the show. Berna Ceppas composed and musically directed a samba-inflected score; Gringo Cardia designed the set and props; Liz Vandal made the costumes, which remain the element even hostile reviewers concede; Eric Champoux lit it. The premiere cast ran to 54 artists. A soundtrack album followed in April 2010.

From the big top to the arena floor

For its first six years OVO toured as a tent show, playing more than thirty cities across six countries. It reached its thousandth performance on 29 January 2012 in Santa Monica, California. In 2016 Cirque converted it into an arena production — a cheaper, faster, higher-capacity format that let the show move weekly rather than seasonally, and which has defined every leg since.

The conversion also opened up venues a chapiteau could never use. OVO played its first UK dates at the Royal Albert Hall from 7 January to 11 February 2018, a 73-performance run in a room Cirque has treated as a London home for more than two decades. It returned to British arenas afterwards, including a stand at Manchester's AO Arena over the Easter weekend in 2024 that one local critic rated among the best things the building had hosted in years.

Then the shutdown. Cirque's touring operation stopped entirely in 2020, and OVO's company did not perform together again for more than two years. Its comeback show was on 11 February 2022 in Bossier City, Louisiana — a small start for the title that would go on to carry most of the company's road mileage. Cumulatively the show has now worked over 40 countries and 253 cities, with artists from around 25 nationalities.

The 2024 rebuild

Late in 2024, for the show's fifteenth anniversary, Cirque reopened OVO rather than retiring it. Three new Brazilian-flavoured songs went into the score, characters were rewritten, and the act list was substantially reworked: slackwire, aerial net, foot juggling, Chinese pole and diabolo were all either new or rebuilt. The stage was redesigned, the props scaled up and the lighting rig improved on what the 2018 touring version carried.

The clearest additions are two. A high aerial net act gives scarabs three raised platforms from which they throw each other across open space. And the Chinese pole routine, performed by fleas, is built around drops that stop within millimetres of the deck.

The rebuilt version spent 2025 on North American arena floors with 53 acrobats and seven musicians, the band playing from a platform close to 40ft up. It reached Philadelphia's Wells Fargo Center on 11–13 July 2025, its first visit to the city since 2016, with five performances across three days, alongside stops in Miami, New Orleans and Charlotte. Cast interviews from that run flagged Chinese pole artist Jesse Harris and tumbler Kilian Mongery.

Standing now: the busiest title Cirque has on the road

OVO came back to the Royal Albert Hall from 9 January to 1 March 2026 with 53 acrobats and a schedule running up to three performances on some days. On 28 January 2026 the producers added 38 further performances to the run, which is the hardest commercial evidence available about the show's current pull: a 160-year-old concert hall, a seven-week booking, and demand sufficient to extend it mid-run rather than bank the sell-outs.

From London the company went straight back onto the continent. Spain in March 2026, Romania in April and Bulgaria at the turn of April and May were followed by an autumn French leg — the Zénith de Rouen at Le Grand-Quevilly on 8–11 October 2026, then the Arena d'Orléans on 15–18 October — plus Austrian dates in late October and the Arena Porte de la Chapelle in Paris in late November 2026.

The schedule already runs deep into the following year: Lyon in January 2027, Munich's Olympiahalle on 27–31 January, the Rudolf Weber-Arena in Oberhausen on 4–7 February, Stuttgart's Porsche Arena on 10–14 February, Bratislava in late February and Hamburg's Barclays Arena in April. That is a near-continuous run of four- and five-night arena stands, which is what a title looks like when a company is treating it as infrastructure rather than as an event.

What the critics actually say

The 2026 London reviews split along a consistent line: the acrobatics and the costumes are not in dispute, the comedy and the concept are. First Night Magazine gave four stars, praising the second act's reworking of familiar disciplines while calling the first act short on identity and the clown sequence filler. Time Out gave three, allowing that the restaging is a clear improvement on earlier versions and that some crude humour has been cut, but describing much of the acrobatic content as pedestrian and the insect idea as thin — performers in costume rather than creatures.

BroadwayWorld also gave three stars, singling out a ten-performer Russian cradle sequence as genuinely startling and dismissing the clowning in blunt terms. The glow-in-the-dark diabolo section drew admiration from one reviewer and a shrug from another on the grounds that LED props no longer surprise anyone. A recurring complaint across all of them is contextual rather than technical: the disciplines OVO performs have spread through contemporary circus since 2009, so work that was once distinctive now has to compete on execution alone.

The warmer notices tend to come from the arena legs rather than the London press. Audience-facing reviews from Manchester and Chicago describe gasping, sustained applause and a room that stays loud at the curtain. Both readings can be true: a show criticised for conservatism by specialist critics is still, for most of the 253 cities it has visited, the most accomplished physical performance to pass through town that year.

The show, now

OVO runs about 125 minutes including a 25-minute intermission, performed straight through with no support act — the linking material is the clowning of Master Flipo and the courtship between the travelling fly and the ladybug. The set is a grass-covered stage under outsized flowers, with an inflatable egg roughly 28ft across as the central prop and a live band of seven playing a samba-leaning score from a platform near the top of the rig. The first half builds through ants foot-juggling, dragonfly hand-balancing, a cocoon-to-butterfly aerial silks transformation and aerial straps, to a scarab Russian cradle finale that throws performers between three raised platforms. The second half opens with a cyr wheel routine that includes a breakdance passage, then moves through a glow-lit diabolo sequence, the Chinese pole fleas with their near-floor drops, spider contortion on a web and slackwire, and closes with crickets tumbling off a trampoline wall into double and triple somersaults. The 2026 London notices ran from four stars down to three: reviewers consistently rate Liz Vandal's costumes and the cradle and pole work highly, consistently dislike the clowning, and several argue the disciplines on show have become common across contemporary circus since 2009. Arena audiences in Manchester and the North American leg have been markedly warmer, with reviews describing audible gasps and prolonged applause at the curtain. Tickets for the Royal Albert Hall run were listed between £44.90 and £189.90, with VIP lounge and dining packages sold separately.

Researched from en.wikipedia.org · cirquedusoleil.com · blog.cirquedusoleil.com · loureviews.blog · firstnightmagazine.com · timeout.com · broadwayworld.com · themanc.com

Pictures

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