The New York Times - Not Recommended
"Simultaneously frenetic and tedious…The athletic circus acts that are laced throughout the show provide the real entertainment, and make the surrounding book scenes and songs feel even more bogus and synthetic…There's no denying the breathtaking magic of seeing bodies swim through the air with such apparent weightlessness. Too bad the musical surrounding them feels just as weightless, and far more forgettable."
Associated Press - Somewhat Recommended
"Sometimes overstuffed and awkward but it always finds its footing when it highlights its soaring, rubber-bodied stars…Unlike other Cirque shows, this one does a really fine job of integrating the acrobats into the narrative…It's thrilling stuff…It's got a cliche-ridden, lumbering plot and dialogue that veers from leaden German operatic to kiddie jokes…A lot of 'Paramour' looks like too many cooks were tossing in ingredients…When the show works, it works."
Hollywood Reporter - Not Recommended
"They seem to have gone out of their way to produce as banal and generic a musical as possible. Featuring atrocious dialogue and forgettable songs, it feels more like a parody than the real thing...The show does have some imaginative, thrilling sequences...But no matter how many times the action spills out over the stage and into the auditorium, it's not enough to draw you into the mess."
Variety - Somewhat Recommended
"The show has a book (corny), a score of show tunes (mindless), and a cast of singing and dancing actors...More happily, it also has those aerialists, acrobats, jugglers, and tumblers we love—and plenty of spectacle...On occasion, smart connections are made between the stage acts and the movie romance...A jaw-dropping high-wire act performed by the phenomenal twin aerialists is more authentically beautiful and sensually alluring than any of the claptrap going on below."
New York Post - Not Recommended
"Rather than play up what it does best — eye-popping stunts and trippy visuals tied together by a loose concept — Cirque went for a Franken-show made up of misshapen parts: circus, dance, musical numbers, interactive projections...The first act is tantalizingly close to working, especially if you can blank out the godawful dialogue...The second act devolves into an incoherent mess topped off by an interminable rooftop chase involving trampolines."
Entertainment Weekly - Somewhat Recommended
"For most of 'Paramour,' you're treated to a middling melodrama with some strong singing and many feats of stagecraft. What you don't get, remarkably enough, are very many over-the-top displays of physical derring-do…The story makes no sense, the singing and dancing is delightful, and the acrobats are impressive but rarely amazing…The musical is trying to be many things at once, and it doesn't fully succeed at any of them."
Newsday - Not Recommended
"Awesome acrobatics and first-rate Vegas/Busby Berkeley visuals are not anything Cirque needs to prove...As a musical, alas, the awkward story is a Golden-Age Hollywood cliché, the choreography is generic and the serviceable music dips lavishly into retro-bombastic influences...The book is dull padding between the wows...We have to wait until someone has a dream ballet or A.J. has a nightmare in order for the creators to justify the marvelous physical virtuosity."
amNY - Not Recommended
"A middling, mindless diversion that awkwardly combines circus feats with elements of traditional musical theater...Cheesy dialogue and forgettable new songs are thrown in...All things considered, ‘Paramour' is a lame, harmless alternative for international tourists who want to see a Broadway show but would prefer something with the Cirque du Soleil imprimatur than a long-running hit like ‘Chicago,' ‘The Lion King' or ‘The Phantom of the Opera.' Frankly, I think they can do better."
Wall Street Journal - Not Recommended
"Alas, only the circus acts soar, sometimes literally, as the show's musical and film elements play, at best, dutiful and uninspired parts…The lyrics are frequently lost in mushy diction and unreliable amplification, which is sometimes just as well for rhymes like 'poet' with 'know it.'...Of course, Indigo will still live on the silver screen, even if—as the star of 'Paramour'—that screen is lackluster and only occasionally brightened by the odd tumble or flying act."
NorthJersey - Not Recommended
"The production is a bumpy, swerving ride. It begins with an assault on the senses, with vast musical routines...If the goal is disorientation, the numbers succeed splendidly...The tone of the story, which has groaningly awful dialogue, veers uncertainly between broad satire and semi-seriousness...'Paramour' gives the sense of being created by a group, with everyone tossing in something."
Time Out New York - Somewhat Recommended
"A desperately mediocre (if extravagant) song-and-dance affair tricked out with specialty acts that are far more engaging than the dopey romantic triangle meant to hold our attention...The real fun (and beauty) happens when the hokey dialogue ends and the artists get to show their wares...You leave wishing the creative team had hired proven talents from real Broadway musicals or else, like shrewd moviemakers, left half of the material on the cutting-room floor."
The Wrap - Not Recommended
"'Paramour' is most successful when it just chucks the plot entirely…By the second act, the three very uncharismatic leads and their generic tunes have definitely worn out their welcome…Wonderful is a chase across Manhattan rooftops. It's most wonderful because the three leads are now gone completely...The number puts much needed bounce back into 'Paramour'...'Paramour' features one of the most outlandishly awful big musical numbers ever. Yes, ever!"
The Guardian - Not Recommended
"Fitfully thrilling and consistently baffling...A work this extravagantly misguided generates its own excitement. The mind can't rest as it struggles to make sense of a woman warbling the title song as a man balances an umbrella on his head...If ‘Paramour' has all the elements of a traditional Broadway tuner, they are jumbled together in so topsy-turvy a fashion as to achieve a perverse originality, a three-ring circus of artistic muddle, miscalculation and mayhem. And zombies."
CurtainUp - Not Recommended
"While there's a story as well as the acrobatics for which Cirque du Soleil is known and show-enhancing video and film elements, that story falls way short of being captivating. And the dazzling visuals not only upstage that story but often seem more wedged in than smoothly interwoven...Given the money spent to bring 'Paramour' to Broadway and the talent behind the scenes and on stage, one can't help wishing they'd come up with something less derivative and, alas, dull."
Talkin Broadway - Not Recommended
"A piece that excites only intermittently as a circus attraction and never as a theatre piece...Many second-rate movies or plays goes at least this deep and, sadly, many go deeper...Yes, the show fails where it counts most. But it's gotten everything else right. The music is lush, brassy, and sumptuously evocative of period excess...The show could not look better...Some substance is ultimately required, but there's nothing to be found beneath ‘Paramour's' bewitching surface."
TheaterMania - Recommended
"Cirque du Soleil delivers a show that is acrobatic, operatic, and completely entertaining. This is musical theater as an extreme sport...This highly stimulating barrage of talent is undeniably entertaining. When it comes to telling a story, however, it's deadly...'Paramour' was written and designed specifically with the intention of using circus performance to tell a new story, and occasionally, it succeeds in doing just that, to thrilling effect."
TheaterScene.net - Recommended
"Philippe Decouflé hasn't managed to make the plotline gel into a sensible, dramatic whole, but he certainly keeps the pace up with the help of the lighting designs of Patrice Besombes and Howell Binkley, the projections of Olivier Simola and Christophe Waksmann and Pierre Masse's rigging and acrobatic equipment which had to be carefully—and safely—integrated into the scenery."
Scribicide - Somewhat Recommended
"The use of dramatic tension to accentuate the acrobatics is too rare. Instead, Paramour confuses the filler with the substance, and we are left wondering why the world's most famous circus would undervalue its greatest asset."
Broadway Blog - Somewhat Recommended
"There are moments of theatrical electricity, such as a meticulously choreographed filmstrip sequence...Edit ‘Paramour' down to 90 minutes and plop it in Las Vegas and you very well might have a hit...But market something as 'a love story, not only for the sense of profound human emotion, but also for the love of art,' as Decouflé states in the program notes, and you're setting up an expectation that ‘Paramour' can't deliver."
Towle Road - Not Recommended
"The trappings that signify this is company's attempt to present a Broadway-style musical - the forgettable songs, canned dialogue, an alternately cliché and cockamamie plot - are disproportionately amateur to both the physical feats on display and the scale of one of Broadway's biggest theatres...More unfortunately, the story becomes a distraction from the incredible physical talent otherwise on display — and a hindrance to the troupe's ability to really wow audiences."
Front Row Center - Somewhat Recommended
"'Paramour' is a thinly disguised excuse to put these gymnasts/dancers on the stage. Noted. The story is a combination of every old plot you can shake a stick at...Indeed there seems to have been a bit of overthinking with this story. This is unfortunate because everyone on that stage is bringing their 'A' game–and they are a formidable collection of talent...Is 'Paramour' brilliant? Not quite. Did I have a great time – you betcha."
WNBC - Somewhat Recommended
"A hybrid musical combining a conspicuously familiar plot with a series of genuinely thrilling athletic sequences…'Paramour' goes heavy on the company's signature stunt sequences to our relief, because there isn't much to be extracted from the often eye-glazing book and score…Kushnier makes the most of his cliché-ridden role, exuding confidence and hubris as needed. Lewis has a beautiful voice and gamely follows the worn path laid out ahead."
Woman Around Town - Somewhat Recommended
"The directorial credo of 'Paramour' appears to be more is better. Scenes are overstuffed with competition for our attention, perhaps in order to distract from a thin book and bland/utilitarian songs, few of whose lyrics are intelligible...For anyone particularly interested in the medium, however, the show is a must on the basis of both imagination and technical expertise...All in all a spectacle the sum of whose parts are not larger than the whole."
StageZine - Somewhat Recommended
"Cirque du Soleil is a unique experience into itself. To box it into a musical format is foolish, for the show to be truly engaging has to soar and be free of any restrictions...My advice to you if you decide to go to 'Paramour' and want to enjoy it to its fullest is this...don't take it seriously, don't try to make sense of the show; you'll just give yourself a headache. Just relax, go with the flow, and enjoy the madcap, zany camp spectacle known as Cirque du Soleil's 'Paramour.'"
DC Metro Theater Arts - Recommended
"Though the show's book and songs are hardly revolutionary, they are not meant to be, but are intended to revisit a bygone era...While Broadway purists might find the book, music, and lyrics somewhat lacking in originality, nostalgia buffs will delight in their references to the Silver Screen and enjoy the evocation of a past era in entertainment, and Cirque du Soleil fans will surely love the experimental blend, enhanced spectacle, and outright fun that is 'Paramour.'"
ZEALnyc - Not Recommended
"The creators of 'Paramour' don't seem to have given a lot of thought as to what larger meaning these admittedly impressive acts should have in the larger narrative of the show...The randomness of most of the circus acts might be a bit more forgivable if the words and music surrounding them showed a bit more craft. However, the songs and the dialogue are unremittingly bland. With all of its financial resources, is this really the best script and score that Cirque could come up with?"
Off Script with Dan Dwyer - Not Recommended
"The stage dynamics, choreographed with jaw-dropping synchronicity, are so dizzying, non-stop and complicated, the hackneyed simplicity of plot is a blessed relief...The opening number is so startling in its busyness it's discombobulating, but when ‘Paramour' legitimately melds acrobatics with plot, song and dance, it flies high...An astonishing spectacle of acrobatic and gymnastic virtuosity, most often exhausting, sometimes exhilarating."
Musical Theater Review - Somewhat Recommended
"You can scoff at the hoary plot, clunky lyrics and preponderance of pulsing music, but 'Paramour' delivers a feast of glitzy entertainment...It's the circus arts that provide the big thrills, executed by a gasp-inducing ensemble...Despite their often feeble nature, the musical theatre accoutrements succeed in giving context to the circus acts, making them stand out more sharply than when presented simply as a parade of skills against some vague theme, as in the other Cirque shows."
BroadwaySelect - Not Recommended
"Atrocious and incompetent effort now being offered by Cirque du Soleil. It shows that this troupe knows nothing about Broadway musicals...Beware, Cirque fans! If in the past you've loved to ‘Ooooh!' and ‘Ahhhh!' at the many wondrous stunts enacted by gymnasts and acrobats, you'll be using your vocal cords far less frequently. About a third of the show is devoted to pyrotechnic feats...The other two-thirds of the show is a musical. It stinks."
