The clown incursion began as a stealth operation, first with one and then another peering tentatively out at us from the wings. Intermission music was still playing, and the audience still milling, as the clowns assembled, until gradually a whole pack of them (a gaggle? a murder? a herd?) stood at the lip of the stage, gazing quizzically at us.
They looked so shy, so endearingly perplexed in their green overcoats and silly moth-eaten caps, the long earflaps out at an angle, as if the air had lofted them mid-flight. Surely these are harmless creatures, no? Surely if one of the clowns in “Slava’s Snowshow” should appear silently at your side, wanting to climb into the crowd and surf the seat backs, the decent thing to do is offer a hand?
That’s what I did, and others also did, and soon clowns were everywhere, agents of a joyous anarchy. In their innocence, the clowns were like small children, and we responded to them with fond indulgence. They clambered over the audience, they sprayed us with water — and we rooted for their triumph.
A note to the clown-averse, who are legion, and to those who shudder at the thought of an interactive experience like “Slava’s Snowshow,” which opened on Thursday night at the Stephen Sondheim Theater: I did not expect to like it, let alone love it, as I did. Eons ago, when I saw “Slava’s Snowshow” Off Broadway at the Union Square Theater, I bristled all the way through. I even hated the famous blizzard at the end.
Now I don’t know what I could have been thinking. By the finish of Wednesday night’s preview performance, I was as relaxed as if I’d just had a massage — though a massage doesn’t, generally speaking, blast paper-confetti snow down your top that you’ll have to scoop out later. (Wardrobe tip: A turtleneck might be a good choice.)
Created and staged by the Russian clown and performance artist Slava Polunin, “Snowshow” has been around since 1993. This is its second trip to Broadway, where it touched down for a holiday run at the more intimate Helen Hayes Theater 11 years ago — at another stressful time in this country, shortly after the economy tanked.
The show’s reappearance now, just as impeachment hearings are getting underway, is the kind of serendipity that we might not have known we needed.
It offers a respite from our fraught present, a portal into a dreamscape where the only dialogue is nonsense talk; where a clown shark swims by, barking at a boat made from a bed frame; where colored fog billows thickly, and soap bubbles float in a cloud. (Long after that cloud dissipated, I spied a minuscule bubble floating alone through the dark in front of me and felt, briefly, stoned.)
“Snowshow” excels at the sort of giddy physical humor that tickles belly laughter from children. A clown with a torso pierced by arrows dies extravagantly, and bloodlessly; the clown culprit, bow in hand, is darling anyway. But this piece isn’t only for kids, and it’s not all frivolity. There’s a forlornness to some of these clowns, and a loneliness. Sometimes they’re scared, too, though they give us no cause to be.
The cast shifts performance by performance, but at the one I saw, it was Polunin who brought the finest touches of existential angst to the comedy. In a baggy yellow clown suit with big red shoes, his face framed by puffs of white hair, he looks like an artisanal Ronald McDonald, but he has such an easy grace and range that you glimpse in it some of the lineage of clowning: Charlie Chaplin in one moment; George Carlin, oddly, in another.
That night’s principal green-coated clown, the lovely Robert Saralp, evoked for an instant Robin Williams in “Waiting for Godot” mode.
These ghosts flickering through are a reminder that we tend to call a lot of our greatest clowns by other names (actor, comedian), while using the word clown — and the phrase “clown show” — to denigrate. The masterfully crafted “Snowshow,” with its benevolent mischief, is evidence of the wrongness of that.
One caveat about the performance space: The Sondheim is a big, tall house, and I sat in the orchestra. Is it as much fun upstairs? I don’t know. Is it safer from clowns and the water they spray so cavalierly? Definitely. The blinding snowstorm that finishes the show, blanketing the aisles with tiny strips of white tissue paper, can’t be as intense up there.
After the storm, and after the bows, the mammoth beach balls come out, rolled into the orchestra section, where the audience keeps them aloft. From the stage, the clowns watch us play.
It’s still a dreamscape, but it’s our dream now.
Slava’s Snowshow
Tickets Through Jan. 5, 2020 at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, slavaonbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
Credits Created and staged by Slava Polunin; scenography by Slava Polunin and Viktor Plotnikov; production management, Tinc Productions; production stage manager, Lee Micklin; company manager, Joel Glassman; general management, KGM Theatrical. Presented by David Carpenter and John Arthur Pinckard, Hunter Arnold, Carl Daikeler, Curt Cronin, John Joseph, Gary Nelson, Van Kaplan/Jeff Wald, EMK International, David and Susan Buchanan/Michael T. Cohen/Gerry Ohrstrom and Mark and Alison Law/John Paterakis/Kayla Greenspan.
Cast Slava Polunin, Francesco Bifano, Spencer Chandler, Georgiy Deliyev, Alexandre Frish, Vanya Polunin, Robert Saralp, Nikolai Terentiev, Elena Ushakova, Aelita West, Bradford West and Artem Zhimo.
Source: Read Full Article
