What a Las Vegas Show’s Rating Doesn’t Tell You
Travel Analysts
Absinthe and O both average 3.98 stars, and for both, about one review in five is negative. Their complaints share almost no vocabulary. Absinthe’s critics name the adult humor — and so do its five-star reviews, at the same rate. O’s critics name the clowns and being bored, which its fans almost never mention. The same rating hides two different situations: a show that isn’t for you, and a show that disappoints people it is for.
Explore the full guide & expert tips ➜Two Shows, One Number
We read 3,755 TripAdvisor reviews of eight Las Vegas attractions, collected without a rating filter so the sample reflects what the platform actually holds. Six are shows with enough reviews to compare.
| 🎭 Show | Reviews read | Average | 🔴 1–2★ | 🟢 4–5★ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Absinthe | 500 | 3.98 | 20.0% | 71.2% |
| O by Cirque du Soleil | 500 | 3.98 | 19.8% | 71.4% |
| Blue Man Group | 500 | 4.13 | 16.2% | 75.4% |
| Michael Jackson ONE | 500 | 4.23 | 13.0% | 76.2% |
| Mystère | 500 | 4.28 | 10.2% | 81.6% |
| Shin Lim: LIMITLESS | 343 | 4.38 | 11.1% | 83.4% |
Two of them are indistinguishable by the numbers. Absinthe — 3.98 average, 20.0% one- and two-star, 71.2% four- and five-star. O by Cirque du Soleil — 3.98 average, 19.8% one- and two-star, 71.4% four- and five-star.
Same average. Same share of unhappy people. Same share of happy ones. If you are choosing between them and the rating is what you have, you have nothing.
The trade-off: an average is a fast, free filter and it does rule things out — the two shows above sit clearly below the other four. It stops working exactly where the decision gets hard, which is between shows that scored the same.
The Complaints Don’t Overlap
We compared the words in Absinthe’s one- and two-star reviews against the words in O’s, on the same sample, a hundred reviews each. The gap is not subtle.
| Word in the review | Absinthe 1–2★ (100) | O 1–2★ (99) |
|---|---|---|
| raunchy | 🔴 23% | 0 |
| jokes | 🔴 23% | 2% |
| vulgar | 🔴 11% | 0 |
| chairs | 🔴 26% | 3% |
| clowns | 0 | 🔴 42% |
| storyline | 0 | 🔴 21% |
| boring | 5% | 🔴 40% |
| asleep | 0 | 🔴 10% |
“Raunchy” appears in 23% of Absinthe’s bad reviews and in none of O’s. “Clowns” appears in 42% of O’s and in none of Absinthe’s. Not “rarely.” Zero, in about a hundred bad reviews each.
Absinthe’s critics describe a comedy problem and a furniture problem:
The chairs were very uncomfortable no padding at all and very tight together. The MC’s were way too raunchy for me and as far as I was concerned not needed way over the top. — TripAdvisor, 2 stars, March 2026
O’s critics describe something they could not follow:
The most horrible and boring show. It was a mash up of good acrobats and divers, with stupid clowns and characters. No plot. I wish I could get my time and money back. Don’t go! — TripAdvisor, 1 star, April 2026
❓ Are Absinthe and O similar shows?
No. They share an average rating and little else. Absinthe is an adult comedy and acrobatics show in a small tent; O is a large-scale aquatic Cirque du Soleil production. Reviews of the two have almost no vocabulary in common, even when the reviewers are equally unhappy.
The Test That Separates a Bad Fit From a Real Fault
Knowing what critics complain about is not enough, because some complaints are descriptions. The useful question is whether the same trait shows up in the good reviews.
If a feature appears at the same rate in one-star and five-star reviews, it isn’t a defect — it is the show, and the two camps simply disagree about whether they wanted it. If it appears far more often in the bad ones, it is doing real damage.
| Show | Trait named in the review | In 1–2★ | In 4–5★ | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Absinthe | Adult humor | 47% | 46% | ⚪ Fit — both camps describe the same show |
| Absinthe | Seats and chairs | 44% | 36% | ⚪ Fit — fans mention it and go anyway |
| O | Water and aquatic staging | 20% | 26% | ⚪ Fit — named more often by fans |
| O | Clowns | 42% | 10% | 🔴 Fault — 4× more common among the unhappy |
| O | Boredom, falling asleep | 47% | 2% | 🔴 Fault — near-absent from the good reviews |
For Absinthe, the adult humor appears in 47% of its bad reviews and 46% of its good ones. That is the same number. Read them side by side and the show is being described identically by both camps:
I understood when I went there would be some Adult humor but I didn’t realize how vulgar it would be. It was so nasty that we got up and left. — TripAdvisor, 1 star, August 2026
Raunchy, surprising, acrobatic show for Adults! This show is for ADULTS ONLY! A must-see show on the Las Vegas strip — TripAdvisor, 5 stars, July 2026
Nobody is wrong about what happened. They wanted different things.
The seats behave the same way — 44% of the bad reviews mention them and 36% of the good ones, and one five-star reviewer treats the discomfort as a problem already solved: “Very uncomfortable seating, glad I read reviews and sat further back.”
O fails the same test. Its clowns appear in 42% of its bad reviews and 10% of its good ones — four times more common among the unhappy. Boredom appears in 47% of the bad and 2% of the good. Those are not descriptions people disagree about. They are a component a large minority actively dislikes, and the show’s fans are not defending it.
The trade-off: this test needs the negative reviews, which is the part platforms bury and most readers skip. It costs you fifteen minutes of reading one-star reviews before booking. That is the whole price, and no rating substitutes for it.
The Cirque Shows Share a Failure the Others Don’t
The pattern in O is not unique to O. We looked for reviewers saying they could not follow what was happening — “no plot,” “no storyline,” “hard to follow,” “made no sense.”
| Show | Cirque? | "No plot / hard to follow" in 1–2★ | Same phrase in 4–5★ |
|---|---|---|---|
| O | ✅ | 🔴 23% | 1.4% |
| Mystère | ✅ | 🔴 14% | 1.7% |
| Michael Jackson ONE | ✅ | 🔴 14% | 0.8% |
| Shin Lim: LIMITLESS | ❌ | 3% | 0.3% |
| Blue Man Group | ❌ | 2% | 0.3% |
| Absinthe | ❌ | 0 of 100 | 0 |
It appears in the three Cirque du Soleil shows and effectively nowhere else. O 23% of bad reviews, Mystère 14%, Michael Jackson ONE 14% — against Blue Man Group 2%, Shin Lim 3%, and Absinthe zero out of a hundred.
That is worth sitting with, because Absinthe and Blue Man Group have no narrative either. The difference is not whether the show tells a story. It is whether the audience arrived expecting one. A Cirque production is staged as a work with a world and a through-line, and some share of the audience spends the evening hunting for a thread that was never promised.
In the five-star reviews of those same shows the complaint sits between 1% and 2%. It is not that Cirque fans found the story. They were not looking for it.
❓ Why do people say Cirque du Soleil shows have no plot?
Because they arrive expecting one. In our sample the complaint appears in 14% to 23% of the bad reviews of the three Cirque shows and in 2% or less of the bad reviews of the non-Cirque ones — even though those shows have no story either. The gap is in what the audience expected, not in what was staged.
How to Read a Show’s Reviews Before You Book
The method that produced everything above works without a corpus. Three questions, in order.
First, ignore the average and find the share of one- and two-star reviews. Among the six shows we measured, averages ran from 3.98 to 4.38 — a narrow band hiding a negative share that runs from 10.2% to 20.0%, which is nearly double.
Second, read ten bad reviews and write down the noun that keeps coming back. Not the adjectives. “Terrible” and “waste” appear everywhere and separate nothing. The nouns are the signal: chairs, clowns, jokes, storyline.
Third, search the good reviews for that same noun. If the fans name it too, it is the show, and you now know something specific about whether you want it. If the fans never mention it, it is a fault, and you have found the thing that will bother you.
The trade-off: this gives you a sharper read than any rating, and it will not tell you whether the acrobatics are good. Craft is the one thing the two camps tend not to fight about: roughly one in five of the bad reviews of each show goes out of its way to praise the performers anyway — 19% for Absinthe, 18% for O. What splits an audience is rarely the skill on stage.
❓ Is a 4-star Las Vegas show better than a 3.9-star one?
Not reliably. In our sample the gap between the best- and worst-rated show was 0.40 stars, while the share of one- and two-star reviews ranged from about one in ten to one in five. The distribution carries more information than the average, and the text of the bad reviews carries more than either.
Method and Limits
The figures come from 3,755 TripAdvisor reviews of eight Las Vegas attractions, collected without a rating filter, published between August 2011 and September 2026 and measured in September 2026. English-language reviews only. Quotes are reproduced exactly as written, including the writers’ own spelling and punctuation.
Not every Strip show is here. Six shows had a large enough unfiltered sample to compare. One well-known venue was excluded because the collection failed on it, and no figure in this article describes it.
The samples are capped, not exhaustive. Five of the six shows returned exactly 500 reviews because that was the ceiling we set, so these are recent-weighted samples rather than the complete history of each listing.
Percentages describe reviews, not audiences. People who write reviews are not a random sample of people who saw the show, and a larger sample does not fix that bias.
Ratings, casts and staging change. Show content, age policies and seating vary by production and can be revised without notice — several of the shows discussed here have changed venue or format in recent years. Confirm current details with the venue or operator before booking. Figures in this article describe reviews published up to September 2026 and are not updated as new reviews arrive.
About the Author
Intercoper Curator Team
Travel Analysts
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