By SHARON EBERSON
It is purely coincidence that Cirque du Soleil’s Crystal, the ice show coming to PPG Arena January 18-21, is led by Crystal Manich. Her resume by any other name would be quite enough.
The Mt. Lebanon native and Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama alum was in Pittsburgh for a Christmastime preview of Crystal, watching over two of her principal skaters at the Ice Rink at PPG Place.
“Growing in Pittsburgh really led me to this point of working with Cirque Du Soleil,” she said.
Manich, who earned a masters in arts management at CMU, has directed operas and musical theater from the West Coast to Pittsburgh Opera, where she guided a production of Handel’s Ariodante, almost a year ago to the date of Crystal coming to her hometown.
Mandich began her association with Cirque du Soleil as artistic director of the 2009-10 Brazilian tour of Quidam.
“It’s been really an exciting time,” Manich said of preparing for a homecoming to include the other Crystal.
“I think the arts in Pittsburgh really influenced my growing up and obviously influenced my career choice in my life, with all of the offerings that the Cultural Trust would bring in. I’ve worked at the Pittsburgh Opera since 2007, so I have long-term affiliation with the Benedum Center and some other venues around town. So it’s really great to be back in Pittsburgh.”
Manich had rarely been on skates herself before her current gig, and there has been a bit of a learning curve. However, she said the “vocabulary of dance” translates well from the stage to the ice.
“Skaters are like dancers, and I’ve been working with dancers for all of my 18 years in theater,” she said.
This is the second coming of a version of Crystal to Pittsburgh, after the show was on ice in Pittsburgh in 2018. Manich is now watching over the production that she says has all the acrobatic thrills and dreamy storytelling of a live Cirque show.
Both were on display as former competitive skaters Hjordis Lee of Canada – who plays the show’s title character – and Michael Helgren of Santa Rosa, Calif., demonstrated their athletic and character chemistry with lifts and spins on a cold December day.
Besides the “circus arts” that are a signature of every Cirque show, the ice allows projections that create landscapes at the push of a button. Having Crystal come to Pittsburgh at this time of year reflects the weather outside and some flurries inside – the production makes approximately 300 snowballs each week.
The show’s story, according to the Cirque press kit, “Crystal is a creative young woman who feels misunderstood and out of sync with herself. To escape her reality, she ventures out on a frozen pond and falls through the ice into an … underwater world of her imagination.” Releasing the power of her own creativity, Crystal learns that “discovering one’s individuality and uniqueness requires venturing out on thin ice.”
That Manich brings her own creativity and theatrical savvy to the ice is not surprising for someone whose career has been marked by versatility, from operas to music videos.
For her feature film debut of the opera The Copper Queen won Best First Time Female Filmmaker honors at the 2021 Toronto International Women’s Film Festival.
Manich, whose heritage is Puerto Rican, makes her home in Puerto Rico when she is not on the road. In 2022, with Celeste Moreno and Bethany Brinton, Manich was a recipient of Theater Latté Da of Minneapolis’s NEXT Generation Commission, which supports the creation and development of new musical theater projects whose creative teams are at least 50 percent women or BIPOC artists.
As she watched Lee and Helgren skate a romantic pas de deux, in a Downtown rink in her hometown, Crystal Manich summed up, “Crystal Is about a young woman’s journey of self-discovery. It’s thrilling, and it’s beautiful.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Cirque du Soleil: Crystal is at PPG Paints Arena January 18-21, 2024. Tickets: https://www.ppgpaintsarena.com/events/detail/cirque-du-soleil-crystal-1.
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