On Tuesday, August 1 I went with my wife, my parents, and my grandmother to see the 8 pm performance of Avaia. The first thing that you notice as you pull in is that you have to pay for parking. It doesn’t cost very much, but if you’ve spent $100 for your family to see the show, being asked to pay $6.50 for parking just doesn’t seem right.
My grandmother doesn’t use a wheelchair, but also can’t walk very far, so we needed handicap parking. The only handicap parking we could see was on the other side of the box office. We found it was closer to park in a regular parking spot that was available. There may have been closer handicap parking, but they weren’t marked well.
Our tickets were at the box office, and I was told to go at least 40 minutes early to pick them up. We got there at about 7:20 and it only took a few minutes for me to pickup the 5 tickets. Then we had over half an hour before the show started. We headed into the concessions tent and expected to be able to go and take our seats. Unfortunately the performance tent was roped off until 7:45 pm. I don’t know if this is common practice, or if there was a problem that night. In either case, they probably had a few more items sold since we were kind of forced to loiter around the concessions tent.
The tents kind of smelled like horses. After a couple of minutes I didn’t notice it all, but my mother said she smelled it the whole time. We went on one of the hottest days of the year, so I’m sure it was difficult to keep everything ventilated well. Overall the tents are very impressive. My father said he didn’t think he was in a tent at all.
Our seats were amazing. When we first got there the usher showed us where our seats were. We were in the front row (so-called Orchestra Seating). Actually, the front row was covered up, and we were in row 2 (the first available row). It ended up that he put us in the wrong seats. We were 2 rows back. They were still great seats; just not quite as good as we first thought they were.
The tent is laid out with 3 types of seating. There are bench seats close to the ring (Orchestra), and then there are “box seats” (Ringside). These are the only regular, padded seats in the tent. There is then a very large aisle that goes around the ring with more bench seats around the outside. The tent seats approximately 1,000 people.
I don’t know for sure how many people were there that night, but I think they were at 60-70% capacity. They had 2 large sections covered so no one could sit there, but most of the other seats were filled.
As I mentioned, it was one of the hottest days of the year. The concessions tent was cooler than outside, but still warm. But the tent itself was much better. It was comfortable enough. However it was a little foggy inside the tent. I assume this was because of the weather, but it could have been caused by something else.
Read more of our series on Avaia:
- Cirque Niagara Avaia – Background
- Cirque Niagara Avaia – Act 1
- Cirque Niagara Avaia – Intermission
- Cirque Niagara Avaia – Act 2
- Cirque Niagara Avaia – Observations
You can see some nice pictures of the tents/grounds, as well as a few pictures from inside in the Cirque Niagara Avaia section of the Niagara Falls Image Gallery.
You can also learn more about Cirque Niagara, Avaia, the creators, and the performers on the official Cirque Niagara web site.