Alegria has been touring since 1994, and it's looking a little tired, a little shopworn. The show's title is a Spanish word meaning "happiness, joy, and jubilation," but although I've been a Cirque fan for years - having seen Mystere, Dralion, Varekai, and Quidam - this show seemed oddly joyless and distinctly thin on material.

The clown sequences went on interminably, while many of the circus performers - gymnasts, aerialists, fire-eaters, hand-balancers, bungee-flyer - seemed merely repetitive, each doing the same thing over and over. Granted, these international performers can do astonishing things with their bodies, which makes it all the more peculiar to find it dull. Cirque's costumes are usually quirky and colorful and weird, while here they seemed cheesy (caveman in leather) or pointlessly commedia dell'arte.

One of the signature pleasures of Cirque du Soleil shows has always been an elusive narrative line - kind of like theatre of the absurd with muscles - as well as otherworldly music and vocalizing. The press release said that Alegria was about a "world where everyone feels imbued with power" and all the "minstrels, rogues, beggars, nobles, children and clowns" were caught in a "world of profound changes." Well, I clearly missed something, since this show didn't seem to be about anything at all, much less all that.

There were two moments in Act Two that struck me as essence-of-Cirque, which is to say mysterious and amazing, full of physical impossibilities and eerie music. Lit by an ornate lantern swinging overhead, two very strong, very young women who practice the Mongolian art of contortion slowly sculpted their bodies into inhuman postures; a strange, tall figure standing on a peg leg and wearing an enormous hat watched them, while a woman in white played the accordion.

Another great Cirque moment was the spectacular troupe of trapeze guys who fly through the air with the greatest of ease, catching one another with breathtaking split-second timing, eventually falling one after another into the net below them.

But two acts do not a cirque make.