“There goes a plane,” I said to my girlfriend over the roar as we settled in to our seats in the big tent pitched in the Mall of America parking lot, just south of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought it was the tempest.”

The tempest arrived in due time, and took the form of interpretive aerial dance. This was, after all, Amaluna, Cirque du Soleil’s take on Shakespeare’s classic man-versus-Caliban drama. Of course, the plot has been somewhat simplified; it’s hard to convey the finer points of the Bard’s complex narrative when only one character talks—and only in short phrases such as, “Relax!”, “I love you!”, and “Turn off all cell phones!”

Amaluna, according to the souvenir program, “welcomes you to a mysterious island governed by goddesses and and guided by the cycles of the moon.” (“Aren’t we all,” commented a friend dryly when we informed her of the show’s premise.) In these remote environs, there’s not a man but a woman in the moon; she gyrates in a hoop that descends so that she might receive the pagan adulation of the island’s elaborately coiffed population.

A few men are glimpsed, acting as spotters for the female light-spinners and presumably performing whatever sexual duties are required of them—but apparently not with distinction, given how ravenously the island’s inhabitants embrace the netful of bare-chested louts (in plastic blue jeans) who are shipwrecked by the storm.

Every Cirque du Soleil show has a theme by which it can be distinguished from the others—there’s “the clown show,” “the bug show,” and “the Michael Jackson show.” It took me a while to figure out what Amaluna was. The “plot show”? The “Shakespeare show”? The “sex show”?

No, Amaluna can’t be the sex show—that’s Zumanity, the Vegas show featuring “the sensual side of Cirque du Soleil”—but it does have a lot of innuendo. Among the few lines spoken in Amaluna are “You! Get in my hole!” A childbirth scene follows.

Amaluna also features what might be the most elaborate allegory for menarche since Lactantius’s The Phoenix. Princess Miranda, “on the brink of womanhood,” cavorts onstage in the person of late-20-something Iuliia Mykhailova clad in a Bond-girl bikini. After pausing for a moment to stand on one hand and (almost) touch her head to her ass, Miranda joins the Moon Goddess for a flight in the moon-hoop before being dunked into a pool with “Roméo,” one of the newly-beached hunks. The lights slowly fade on their damp embrace.

Miranda’s square mother, Queen Prospera, takes exception to her nubile daughter cavorting with a bunch of shipwrecked sailors, so she airlifts the princess into the clouds…but never fear, Roméo’s special talent is grasping a pole with his manly thighs and thrusting himself upward to achieve a happy ending. That sounds irresistibly homoerotic, but nay, in the world of Amaluna, heterosexual congress is the salve that saves worlds.

You’ve guessed it: Amaluna is “the women show.” It was conceived as, according to various blurbs in the program, “a production featuring female performances” (“we reversed our usual casting standards”); “an homage to women”; “a tribute to the work and voices of women”; and, in the words of Cirque founder Guy Laliberté, “a strange, enchanting world imbued with femininity, where the codes of life are governed by the cycles of the moon.”

One might have hoped that Cirque, which prides itself on its pan-ethnic puree, might have devised a way to celebrate femininity without creating a show hinging on the need for men to bring “renewal and balance” to a sex-starved matriarchal commune…but then again, this is a company run by a guy named Guy. He gave us the moon and an all-girl rock band, and now we want third-wave feminism too? Mon déesse!

– Jay Gabler