Dying is nothing.- 25/10/2005.

Théâtre Municipal.- Auch.- France.
Emilie Mugabo, Sud Ouest.

The performance turned out just fine when it premiered at the festival: exquisite and witty. Right from the very start, the three clowns from "Los Excéntricos" had the audience in Auch eating out of their hands. DYING IS NOTHING ... Mademoiselle Marceline, Signor Sylvestre and Monsieur Zaza could have turned up on a motorised wheelbarrow cum bicycle without leaving the audience at Circa even more open-mouthed than they were yesterday afternoon. Sparks flew in the performance by the three clowns from "Los Excentricos" in a packed Auch theatre: sparks you could not have quenched with dry ice. For the kind of people who easily go all red-faced and split their sides laughing, the aura of seriousness given off by the firemen in their uniforms will leave them pleasantly speechless. No-one could resist the socks used as hosepipes, the three-legged concert and other jokes by the three performers from Barcelona. “It is better to cry with joy than to die laughing” Marceline used to say at the beginning, although now the audiences are getting so big she's not sure which of the two options is better. WET YOURSELF LAUGHING. Would you cry at the tragic end of that disastrous artiste beaten down by her peers with cloths, frying pans and blows to the head? Or die at the thought of not having been able to overcome the vacuum cleaner and release the beautiful damsel and, above all, make the audience wet themselves laughing? The way they act, the expression on their faces and the props they have chosen, everything leads to delirium, even the damsel's death. In more than an hour and a quarter, these musical clowns and tightrope walkers mixed little sketches and serenades that left no-one less than truly surprised to find a work of such length contain such a wealth of performance from start to end. The mix included their live musical arrangements with the mini-guitar and accordion, as well as other instruments and ingenious sound effects that make a right old racket. Today and tomorrow at 3 o'clock they will be back with “Música Maestro”, the name of the snappy show. Marceline, Sylvestre and Zaza, the performers from Barcelona, received a torrent of applause yesterday afternoon when their performance premiered at CIRCA. "DOING WHAT CLOWNS DO BADLY WELL" The “Música Maestro” show was created three years ago and has already been performed in many countries such as Poland, Brazil and Canada. The show has been spiced up with all manner of ingenious inventions. The audience gets to see such wonders as a Rumanian violin-trumpet and a robot head built by Silvestre. “That is the work of a clown. You have to know how to do a lot of things and have a smattering of every language. In fact, a clown's art consists of doing everything very well, but as if you were doing it very badly”, they admitted. We asked what they thought of the audience at Auch and they gave us a one-word answer: “Perfect.”. “For old clowns it is a true pleasure to perform here,” they added. “There was a real sense of interaction with that great audience, a true flood of emotions that we really did not expect. And the fact that it happened in such a small, charming theatre makes it even more incredible”. In any case, the audience could tell from the artistes' complicity that the most important thing for them is having fun. So if you saw it yesterday, be sure to go back again today, because as the three performers said: “it is the same show, but it won't turn out the same way”.
Emilie Mugabo, Sud Ouest.