Critics had this to say about The Circus of Vices & Virtues (Spring 2003):

EDITOR'S PICKS
The Circus of Vices and Virtues 2003:
Physical Performance for a Polarized World
By Jonathan Kalb, Hunter Online Theater Review (www.hotreview.org)

Forget Cirque de Soleil. Forget UniverSoul Circus. All intelligent people craving a springtime dose of circus should head for Cirque Boom's wonderful new "vices and virtues" piece, playing at the converted bathhouse called the Brooklyn Lyceum in Park Slope until April 12. This show, directed by Ruth Juliet Wikler, is a unique fusion of real ideas and big-top spectacle, marrying trapeze, rope dancing, tumbling, stilt-walking and clowning with politically tinged satire in the spirit of the German Karl Valentin and the Russians Bim and Bom. The dead-on skit called "Pride," performed by a fantastic young clown named Anna Zastrow, is alone worth the trip. Just GO.

CIRCUS OF THE SCARS
Few laughs among Cirque Boom's feats of vice & virtue
By Paulanne Simmons
for The Brooklyn Papers

In Roman times, circuses were designed to divert attention from a deteriorating society, and for the most part they still perform that function today. But in an ironic twist, Cirque Boom has created "The Circus of Vices and Virtues 2003," now at the Brooklyn Lyceum, to focus our attention on the evils of the Western world.

Inspired both by the work of the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel, who infused his paintings with allegorical, sometimes sinister meaning, and the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the societal tensions that have followed, Cirque Boom artistic director Ruth Juliet Wikler has used the world of clowns, aerial artists and acrobats for political satire and social commentary.

Cirque Boom is a Brooklyn-based ensemble founded by Wikler in January 2002.

"The Circus of Vices and Virtues 2003" is subtitled: "Physical performances for a polarized world." There's plenty of human vice here but little human virtue.

The circus opens with "Charivari," described in the program as "a riff on the pre- and post-show melees of traditional circus." Here the sinister and sensuous contortions of the acrobats, and the shrill, pre-recorded music are ample warning to the audience that this will be a circus unlike any they've seen before.
In the section called "Sloth," a housewife (Cody Schreger) wrestles with two goblins who emerge from a cardboard TV set (Olivia Lehrman and Leah Abel). Two executives (Jeff Wills and Anna Zastrow) stride onto the stage on stilts and destroy the world (a small globe that looks like a bowling ball) in "Greed." Three dolls (Leah Abel, Lehrman and Schreger), connected and sometimes dangling from a common rope, put on their makeup, then ruin each other's makeup in "Envy."

Two of the most successful segments are "Lust," in which Melissa Riker has choreographed her own graceful performance on what Wikler calls an "aerial fabric loop," and "Pride," Zastrow's hilarious portrayal of an aspiring corporate executive who turns from a timid clown into a virago with a whip.

In between the acts, Sonia Werner, dressed in a three-piece suit and sporting a painted moustache, appears as "Dick." Dick is wheeled onto the stage in a makeshift circus float made principally from a shopping cart, and spouts the babble of the worst kind of politician.

The goal of Cirque Boom, "to create circus that matters and theater that amazes," is certainly worthwhile - even noble. But the first and primary goal of entertainment should be to entertain. In other words, the medium is the sugar that makes the medicine go down.

The 10 performers in the Cirque Boom ensemble are talented circus artists, but they are scarcely allowed to display their skills. The trapeze that has been set up onstage is used only once.

For the most part, the performers jump over and under each other, engage in stage combat and execute (admittedly impressive) gymnastic feats. But let's face it, this show is billed as a circus, and the audience has a right to expect something more.

Nevertheless, Wikler and her cast and crew deserve credit for their effort to unite spectacle with serious thought. "The Circus of Vices and Virtues" attempts to expose the core of human misbehavior - the characteristics that lead humans to harm one another as they pursue power, material goods or satisfaction of desire. Unfortunately, the troupe stops there. How much more effective this circus might have been had Cirque Boom also turned its attention to how people can overcome base desires, and better themselves and the world.

Most of the performers in "The Circus of Vices and Virtues" appear quite young. Perhaps with time, they will learn to take themselves a bit less seriously, to lighten up, have fun, and allow the audience to have fun, too.

With the confidence that comes with age and experience they will realize that people can be touched without being consistently banged over the head, and that great art made in the midst of war, plagues and other calamities, may present tragedy but also offer hope.

'Vices and Virtues' In a Former Bathhouse
By Abby Ranger
Brooklyn Free Press, March 28-April 3, 2003

Most people know Pieter Bruegel the Elder-if they know of him at all-as the 16th Century Netherlandish painter of peasants carrying loaves of bread and hunters in snowy fields. In the fall of 2001, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of a different vein of the artist's work: his prints and drawings, the pieces for which Bruegel was famous in the 16th century.

Here were landscapes of craggy cliffs, ships rolling on the sea, and delicate little prints-dozens of them-depicting gory, horrific fantasies. Monkeys scowled, eggs stood up on clawed feet, fishes and snails consumed themselves, and demons slid knives through flaps of skin. In each of Bruegel's small worlds, every seam was cracking open, every strap bursting.

A month after the exhibition at the Met closed, Ruth Juliet Wikler founded Cirque Boom, the Brooklyn-based circus theater company that is now performing its third production inspired by Bruegel's intricately grotesque images.

Wikler, who has studied aerial performance in Argentina and in England, produced the first of those three shows, Bruegel Triptych, in collaboration with the Met exhibition's curator's sister, Claudia Orenstein. Following the Triptych came Wikler's own production, The Circus of Vices and Virtues 2002.

Now showing at the Brooklyn Lyceum, a former public bathhouse in Park Slope, is a more cohesive version of last year's show: The Circus of Vices and Virtues 2003.

"Cohesive" might be a misleading word. The performance is a high-energy spectacle: acrobats, aerialists, stiltwalkers, a live DJ, impersonations of presidents and CEOs, a scene about a giant television, and another about an even bigger fish.

The subtitle of the Circus is "physical performance for a polarized world," which means that it aims to be, according to Cirque Boom's website, an "indictment of contemporary politics" as well as "circus that matters and theater that amazes." Wikler emphasizes that this is a circus into which she is experimentally adding theatrical elements, not theater with the experimental addition of circus elements.

How does this all look? Well, an evening at The Circus of Vices and Virtues begins with girls in red spandex and high ponytails bouncing out to sit in audience members' laps. A man in a suit collects everyone's tickets in a hat, and then scurries upstairs to "Dick" (Sonia Werner), who adds a long strand of his own ballots and pronounces himself elected.

Dick, who wears a standard-issue navy suit and red tie, spends most of the rest of the night riding around in a shopping cart decked out with plastic dolls' heads and tinsel. The virtues, two lovely acrobats in white leotards, wheel him out between the scenes, and he snaps on surgical gloves and sputters proclamations about sin.

The performance is structured, like one of Bruegel's series of prints, around seven vices, with one scene for each vice. Criticism gets aimed at predictable targets: the scene about sloth is set in front of a television and the one about greed features "executives" who teeter on stilts.

There are jabs at cell phones, duct tape, cosmetics and trophy wives. In "Pride," a clown called Helda (Anna Zastrow), starts as a meek, paper-pushing drone and evolves by increasingly absurd, funny stages into a rabid, whip-cracking workaholic.

The Circus' most beautiful moments happen in the air. The opening sequence, after the skewed election, becomes the flying dance of the two virtues (Teresa Kochis and choreographer Melissa Riker) sliding up and down ropes in unison.

"Lust" is simple. Riker flips and twists around long loops of fabric that hang from the Lyceum's high ceiling, accompanied by DJ fflood's rhythmic pulses. Her spine is serpentine, and her movements so taut and clean that vice seems to conflate with virtue.

There is even something bizarrely appealing about "Envy," in which three women in body harnesses and white gowns (Leah Abel, Olivia Lehrman, and Cody Schreger) counter-balance one another, floating together to smear each other's faces with lipstick and shaving cream.

In the final, numbing act, "Wrath," Abel swings on a trapeze and shouts lines from a Caryl Churchill play. The other acrobats appear in burlap skirts and go to war, tearing at each other, even simulating a rape.

On opening night at the Lyceum, with several people in the audience just having spent the day at a somber peace march in Manhattan, the social commentary bordered on unnecessary. It wasn't just a matter of preaching to the converted, but of loudly warning against violence that, to some degree, we all knew to be already happening.

This is no prudish complaint: an attempt to bring Bruegel's imagery to the stage demands some filth and horror. But Bruegel's combination of humor and depravity has a timelessness that the Circus of Vices and Virtues can't claim, and as the war unfolds, New York audiences are craving theater that heals, not indicts.

On the other hand, performance-even funny, physical, acrobatic performance-shouldn't have to be palliative. Contemporary circuses shouldn't be confined to inspiring awe. Cirque Boom announces that they can be about anger and frustration, too.