Cirque du Soleil’s Echo - in Toronto, then Gatineau and Vancouver - is a high point for bigtop circus design

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• Title: Echo
• Written and directed by: Mukhtar Omar Sharif Mukhtar
• Company: Cirque du Soleil
• Venue: Under the Big Top, 2150 Lake Shore Blvd. W.
• City: Toronto to Aug. 4; then Gatineau from Aug. 16 to Sept. 22; and Vancouver from Oct. 9 to Dec. 15

Echo, Cirque du Soleil’s first brand-new big-top show since the pandemic, made a resounding impact on me in its world premiere in Montreal’s Old Port last summer.

The gorgeous giant cube that is the show’s main set piece fascinated me, as did the outside-the-box rhythm of its acrobatics and clown routines. I had it pegged as an exciting step forward for the performing-arts company that reinvented the circus starting in the 1980s but which had artistically plateaued by the 2010s.

This summer, Echo, which credits Mukhtar Omar Sharif Mukhtar as its author-director, is in Toronto to Aug. 4 – ahead of runs in Gatineau and Vancouver. And it’s changed – in small ways that make its routines feel, well, a tad bit more routine.

The star is still the cube by the great British designer Es Devlin, whose ingenious morphing theatre sets I’ve long admired; Devlin was originally supposed to direct Echo (when it was first scheduled to premiere in 2020 under the title Under the Same Sky) but she left that role at some point during the pandemic.

Devlin’s all-white cube – a couple storeys tall – waits on the stage like a present waiting to be unwrapped as you take your seat.

A childlike character named Future (trapeze artist Évelyne Lamontagne, at the performance I saw) and her dog Iwe (Philippe Dupuis, also a juggler) discover this cube through a game of fetch. Touching it causes them to be transported to a magical land populated by a papier-mâché menagerie.

For its first trick, Devlin’s cube becomes a screen for swirling projections of underwater scenes, while humanoid animals in crumpled white costumes perform an aerial dance around and on it; the cube moves toward the audience and rotates as this airborne ballet takes place (shades of the gravity-defying battles in found in Robert Lepage’s great Cirque show Ka in Las Vegas.)

The big box’s next trick is even more astounding. Its walls turn out to be made up of smaller boxes, square and rectangular ones, and they appear to move about mechanically and occasionally pop out like little box babies, caught by company members.

In Montreal last year, I was rendered childlike with delight at the mixture of projection and choreography that made the set seem like a possessed Rubik’s cube. On one level, my brain could process what was happening, but on another, it was boggled.

This wasn’t quite the case when I revisited Echo in Toronto. Is this because I had figured out the visual trickery? Or was the effect toned down so it wouldn’t distract from the human tumbling act that surrounded it?

It’s true that I was far more impressed by the superhuman feats – and feet – of Robel Weldemikael and Meareg Mehari this time around. One man flips the other around at incredibly fast speeds with his tootsies; terrifying.

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The humans that I loved the most, and equally in Montreal and Toronto, are the clowns known as Double Trouble (Clément Malin and Caio Sorana).

Dressed like a couple of Inspector Gadgets, they are the downright funniest double act I’ve ever seen in a Cirque touring show, performing a pair of routines – comically elegant in their simplicity – that involve stacking boxes.

Their clown antics lead to Devlin’s next cubic coup de theatre – in which her set turns into a giant jack-in-the-box. I don’t want to spoil this effect, but just as the opener has more in common with dance than circus, this Act One finale has more in common with theatrical spectacle.

There’s more to be unboxed in the second act, which begins with a slow slackwire act that actually takes place inside the cube – to the sombre, suspenseful sound of enjoyable orchestral pop that sometimes veers into Sigur Ros territory, played by a band of six vocalists/instrumentalists wearing horns on their heads.

Here, unfortunately, is one of the places where Echo has become less impressive: There were previously two performers balancing on wires – and there was fire inside the cube with them. By e-mail, a Cirque du Soleil representative told me the fire was creating some technical issues – and that “the show team is looking for a solution.” Echo is also currently training a new artist for this number, so hopefully it will return to its former blazing glory soon.

An improvement in Echo’s second act comes from switching the dog’s diabolo act out for a juggling act that is more convincingly canine.

But Future’s emotional arc didn’t hit me the way it did previously. The idea of casting a circus performer instead of a clown as the guiding figure you often find in Cirque shows struck me as brilliant last year; it allowed for a true character arc that led to a heroic and muscular climax as Future performed a trapeze routine.

For whatever reason, the journey of the show wasn’t as clear in this version, which culminates in a more delicate dance trapeze act.

What does all this mean to the average Cirque du Soleil goer? Not much. Echo is as much of a must-see for fans of design as it was in Montreal – and my companion said it was the best Cirque touring show she’d ever seen. It’s just those of us who follow Cirque for a living who might be a little concerned about Echo having faded a bit from one year to the next.