Three Ring Circus with Dinner
“Love, Chaos & Dinner” is Teatro ZinZanni’s tagline, which serves you dinner over an entertaining and interactive 3-hour circus show. Set in Pier 29 on The Embarcadero, Teatro ZinZanni has been wowing San Franciscan audiences since 2000 with a complicated mix of theater and spectacle.
Teatro ZinZanni is not a big budget Vegas-style show, but instead draws its acclaim from an incredibly talented group of performers. Voronin, one of the original cast members, is a Ukrainian illusionist known throughout the world as “The Maestro.” He plays a mesmerizing, slightly vampiric, and practically silent magician with a puppet assistant performed by Svetlana. His facial expressions steal the show by themselves, but his illusory acts don’t disappoint. Svetlana beautifully combines mime, acrobatics and pink to create a fantastic theater character.
Though Voronin might have been my favorite performer, he was by no means the main performer, with time divided very equally across this incredibly talented group. Michael Davis plays the chef and the comic relief as Tad Overdone and comes out with some great zingers. The Randols performs a scary and amazing roller-skating act. Duo Artemiev trapeze in style and one of the Duo, Elena has a funny Mimi persona when not trapezing. Add to that singers, a band, and of course a clown, and it feels like there are more performers than audience members.
The theater itself is an intimate circular structure and acts are performed both in the center as well as on the stage at the front. I did have a slight creak in my neck from positioning and re-positioning myself to view the entertainment, but the small theater really allows you to enjoy the performance up close, to make sure you don’t miss each wonderful Voronin expression or Svetlana look.
The dinner itself was quite good, though not amazing. The cuisine was slightly experimental and definitely well-prepared. Each dinner course is brought out by the chef Tad Overdone himself with some pre-course entertainment and an accompanying special dance. The courses are perhaps a little too far apart for my taste since the less filling options come out first. Because of this, I was quite happy I got the wine pairing, at extra cost, so that I could enjoy something aromatic and tasty throughout the whole performance.
What is most amazing about this show is how much time and energy was put into making it a complete experience. It was just how you want a show to be: it’s entertaining from the get-go, but it grows, builds up and surprises until it’s just awe-inspiring. Teatro ZinZanni juggles being dinner entertainment, theater, and a circus, but succeed at all three, and it’s hard to say whether their death-defying feats or their theatric flare is their more defining feature.
With pricing for general admission starting at $117 for Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, $136 for Fridays, and $150 for Saturdays, I originally had some concerns about the show being worth the cost. Those fears dissipated after seeing the show as it is easily in league with (and in some cases excels) several Las Vegas and New York shows for pure entertainment experience. Teatro ZinZanni doesn’t skimp on quantity or quality of talent, there are no bad seats in this very intimate theater, and hey, tickets includes a several-course dinner.
This summer they have rotating guest performances for Madame ZinZanni’s character. For more information, check out their website love.zinzanni.org.
