Nobody Warns You About O
Travel Analysts
Absinthe and O carry the same 3.98 average and almost the same share of bad reviews. But 28.9% of Absinthe’s positive reviews contain a warning about who should not go, against 1.1% of O’s. Absinthe’s fans can tell you whether it is for you. O’s cannot, because what divides its audience is not a feature you can be warned about — it is whether you found the clowns funny and the pace slow.
Explore the full guide & expert tips ➜The Same Rating, and Only One of Them Is Predictable
We read 500 TripAdvisor reviews of each show, collected without a rating filter. On the numbers they are twins: 3.98 average for both, 20.0% and 19.8% at one and two stars, 71.2% and 71.4% at four and five.
Then we counted how often the good reviews warn a reader off.
| 🎭 Show | Average | 🔴 1–2★ | Warnings in its 4–5★ reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Absinthe | 3.98 | 20.0% | 🔴 28.9% (103 of 356) |
| O by Cirque du Soleil | 3.98 | 19.8% | 1.1% (4 of 357) |
| "Warning" means a sentence aimed at a reader the writer expects to dislike the show: "if you are easily offended," "adults only," "be prepared." | |||
Absinthe: 103 of 356. O: four of 357.
That gap is the useful thing here, and it is not about which show is better. It is about which one you can research. A show whose fans keep saying “not if you’re easily offended” has handed you a filter. A show whose fans say nothing of the kind has not — and its 71.4% of happy reviewers is telling you nothing about whether you will be one of them.
Its Fans Do Not Defend the Clowns
Run the fit-or-fault test on O trait by trait and most of it comes out clean.
| Trait named in the review | In its 1–2★ | In its 4–5★ | Fit or fault? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boredom, falling asleep | 47% | 2% | 🔴 Fault — 21× more common among the unhappy |
| Price, or whether it was worth it | 46% | 13% | 🔴 Fault — 4× |
| The clowns | 42% | 10% | 🔴 Fault — 4×, and only 3 of the 37 defend them |
| Water and aquatic staging | 20% | 26% | ⚪ Fit — named more often by fans |
| Music | 16% | 10% | ⚪ Fit |
| Costumes and set design | 8% | 11% | ⚪ Fit |
The water, the staging and the music behave like Absinthe’s crude humor: named at similar rates by both camps, which means they are the show rather than a defect. The aquatic staging is actually named more by the people who loved it, 26% against 20%.
Two things break that pattern, and one of them is unusual.
The clowns appear in 42% of the bad reviews and 10% of the good ones. That alone makes them a fault rather than a feature. But the interesting part is what happens inside that 10%. Of the 37 positive reviews that mention the clowns, only three praise them. The rest bring them up to apologize:
The clowns did not really fit the style of the program. — TripAdvisor, 4 stars, May 2026
Not too sure about the clowns. They made the show appear a bit disjointed. Overall, we enjoyed the experience. — TripAdvisor, 4 stars, November 2025
Compare that to Absinthe, where the crude humor is named by 45.5% of the fans as the reason to go. The clown segments in O have almost no constituency. People who loved the show mostly liked it despite them.
There is a minority report, and it is worth including:
From the French clowns that opened the show to the acrobatics and beautiful sets - it was SO good! — TripAdvisor, 5 stars, July 2026
Three of 357. That is the size of the group defending the part that a third of the show’s critics single out.
❓ Are the clowns in O worth sitting through?
For most reviewers who enjoyed the show, they were something to get past. The clowns appear in 42% of O’s one- and two-star reviews and 10% of its four- and five-star ones, and of the 37 positive reviews that mention them, three actually praise them. The acrobatics and the water staging draw near-universal agreement; the clown interludes do not.
The Other Fault Is Pace, and It Never Appears in a Good Review
Boredom is named in 47% of O’s bad reviews and 2% of its good ones — a twenty-one-fold gap, the widest of any trait we tested on this show.
Underneath it sits a phrase with a perfect record. “Fell asleep” appears in nine of the 99 bad reviews and in none of the 357 good ones. People do not qualify that one. Either the show held them or it did not.
$400 snooze ... oh the clowns, the clowns deserve a special mention I’ve had funnier dental work. — TripAdvisor, 2 stars, August 2026
Price behaves the same way, and it is the third fault: money is raised in 46% of the bad reviews and 13% of the good ones. That is not a complaint about the ticket being expensive in the abstract — O’s fans know what they paid and do not bring it up. It surfaces when the evening did not justify it.
The trade-off: pace is the one thing on this list you genuinely cannot research. Crude humor you can be warned about. A slow second act, in a wordless show, lands differently on different people on different nights, and the reviews cannot sort you in advance.
What This Means If You Are Choosing
The rating is doing nothing for you here. Both shows sit at 3.98, and one of them is a known quantity while the other is a coin flip.
If the fans of a show are not warning anybody, read the faults instead of the average. For O that list is short and specific: the clowns, the pace, and whether the evening felt worth the money. Two of those three you can partly plan around — go rested, and do not book it as the last thing on a long day.
Do not use O’s positive reviews as a description. They agree overwhelmingly on the diving and the water, which is the part nobody disputes. They are silent on the part that produces its bad reviews, which is exactly the opposite of how Absinthe’s positive reviews behave.
The trade-off: everything above is about reducing the chance of a bad evening, not raising the chance of a great one. The 71.4% who rated O four or five stars describe something they found genuinely beautiful, and nothing in this article argues with them.
Method and Limits
Figures come from 500 TripAdvisor reviews of O and 500 of Absinthe, collected without a rating filter in September 2026 and published between 2011 and September 2026. English-language reviews only. Quotes are reproduced exactly as written, including the writers’ own spelling and punctuation.
All rates are from the unfiltered sample. A second pass restricted to one- to three-star reviews exists in our corpus and is used for nothing in this article.
“Warning” is a pattern match. We counted positive reviews containing phrases such as “easily offended,” “adults only,” “be prepared,” “not for you if,” and also a looser set — “don’t expect,” “if you’re looking for.” O scored 1.1% on the first and zero on the second. A warning phrased in words we did not anticipate is not counted, so both figures are floors.
Boredom reviews are shorter, not longer. Within O’s bad reviews, the ones naming boredom run to a median 405 characters against 558 for the rest. That is the opposite of the usual confound: this complaint is not an artifact of people writing more.
Three of 357 is three of 357. Where the numbers are small we give the raw counts rather than a percentage, because the counts are the honest form.
Cirque du Soleil revises casts, staging and running order. Confirm current details with the venue before booking. Figures describe reviews published up to September 2026 and are not updated as new reviews arrive.
About the Author
Intercoper Curator Team
Travel Analysts
Our team researches and curates tour experiences. We combine local knowledge with rigorous verification to recommend only tours worth your time.
