For those of you who need your Cirque du Soleil fix, Sony Pictures has released a filmed version of Delirium, a musical-based extravaganza that normally plays as a stage show.  While the best Cirque shows are in Las Vegas, where cash-rich casinos can build custom theaters for stage-levitating spectacles like KA and sublime water-works like O, Delirium on screen still has pleasures to be enjoyed.

It’s an urban tale with visually stunning tableaux in which music and visuals meld together in a quest for balance in a world increasingly out of sync with reality. Bill — the clownish main character — is an ordinary man living inside a bubble — more and more recluse in a society where even relationships are “virtual,” and television and computers have become ubiquitous devices that isolate us from one another.

On his journey, he meets a myriad of characters that bring him, little by little, on the cusp of growth and change. He eventually learns to ground his energy into the real world. At the end of his voyage, Bill enlists those around him in a quest for balance.

Delirium is based on a musical rather than an acrobatic structure — a first for the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil. Melodies, musicians, and singers are the driving force of this show that features a series of tableaux made up of 21 melodies in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and various African dialects. 

African singers, Gregorian chanters, Brazilian samba, and fusion of every type drive the show, which still contains dance, unreal acrobatics, and various aerial feats which one expects from the Cirque du Soleil.