Slava's Snow Show
Review from the SF Chronicle
Slava’s Snowshow: Clown show. Created and staged by Slava Polunin. Directed by Victor Kramer. (Through May 7. Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco. 90 minutes. Tickets $37-$75. Call (415) 512-7770
Who says opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck? One of the odder benefits of our prolonged rainy season turns out to be having an umbrella handy when clowns start spraying water on an audience. Another unexpected benefit is the joyous relief afforded by a rare April blizzard.
Such relief came to San Francisco on Wednesday with the opening of "Slava's Snowshow" in the Best of Broadway series at the Golden Gate Theatre. It's more than just a good excuse to get out of the rain. The clowns are funny and forlorn. The design is enchanting. The climax is a bust-out party offering every inner child in the house a chance to act out with gleeful abandon. And the snow -- the prevailing weather inside the Golden Gate -- is blessedly dry.
So is much of the humor -- sometimes dry in a playfully surreal, Fellini-esque mode; more often in the how-could-things-get-worse tradition of much Russian humor, our own silent film comedies and the plays of Samuel Beckett. Then there are times when the dryness is merely arid, or was on opening night. Even after the many years that Slava Polunin -- the master clown known as Slava, who created, continually re-creates and stars in the show -- has been touring his "Snowshow" around the world, parts of it seemed underdeveloped Wednesday.
A caveat is in order before we go any further. The "Snowshow" I saw may be different from the one seen on any other night, let alone the one that's still enjoying a long run off-Broadway -- though now without Slava. As he's said in many interviews, Slava considers "Snowshow" a constant work-in-progress, and has since he began performing it (under the name "Yellow") in Russia in '93 (parts of it have been featured in Cirque du Soleil's "Alegría" since '94).
He reportedly reshuffles the cast nightly, reassigning roles among the nine other clowns in the cast (not all of whom perform each time), to keep things fresh. Even Rastyam Dubinnikov's classic slapstick, meteorological sound cues and musical selections may differ from one performance to the next. Though Victor Kramer is credited as director, Slava is continually restaging the show.
The snow, however, is a constant -- as are the stars and moons that are prominent features of Victor Plotkinov's delightful design scheme, and the colorful array of large and larger balls (or planets) that bombard the audience in the riotous finale. The snow is already piled in drifts throughout the theater before the show begins, glowing in the blue wash of Oleg Iline's lights. The walls are covered in child-fantasy deep blue quilts of starry skies and occasional slivers of moon -- the same panels, in beguilingly different sizes, that make up the stage backdrop.
A cosmic clash of sound, a puff of smoke, and Slava appears -- a classic woebegone tramp-clown in baggy, bright yellow spacesuit, fluffy red slippers and scarf, big red nose, deeply hollowed eyes and great puffs of white hair accenting his bald pate. His mastery is as immediately apparent as the long rope he drags behind him and the noose around his neck. Working with the rope, executing a variety of funny walks, growing or shrinking within his suit to seemingly impossible degrees, he's instantly magnetic, a charismatic master of evoking hilarity with great economy of gesture.
Several of the other clowns in the company are wonderfully proficient as well, such as the green-garbed figure (part of the Green Team) in a funny, extra-broad floppy hat and ridiculously long shoes who mirrors Slava's movements from time to time. But some of their routines didn't come off particularly well on opening night, such as one green clown's bit with a pet balloon and talking kazoos, or a long musical number for three yellow-clad clowns -- each of which dragged on too long without much of a payoff.
But then, payoff isn't the point for most of the routines, or for "Snowshow" itself. Slava works in a kind of existential comedy realm where a dream of sailing away on a bedstead boat -- with a broom for a bowsprit and the pipe in your mouth as a smokestack -- may encounter watery floors and a passing shark. Or where great sheets of cobwebby cotton may descend to envelop a clown, and much of the audience as well.
Time, it turns out, is as mercurial as every other aspect of reality in this world. Stay too long in the lobby at intermission and you'll find that the clowns have gone on without you -- descending into the audience to walk the armrests, plop in laps and polish bald heads. Once the blizzard hits and the big bouncing balls fill the house, it's hard to tell when the show actually ends. The clowns stand onstage watching the audience take over, jostling and leaping to bat the giant orbs around.
The mere act of jumping about, arms raised, in a big crowd creates a sense of euphoria (as it does in that other touring clown show, "Aga-Boom," which played the Alcazar Theatre in December). You don't have to attend "Snowshow" to experience that. But you have to go to enjoy Slava's inspired clowning and the enchanting spell his show can weave.
Slava’s Snowshow: Clown show. Created and staged by Slava Polunin. Directed by Victor Kramer. (Through May 7. Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco. 90 minutes. Tickets $37-$75. Call (415) 512-7770 Who says opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck? One of the odder benefits of our prolonged rainy season turns out to be having an umbrella handy when clowns start spraying water on an audience. Another unexpected benefit is the joyous relief afforded by a rare April blizzard.
Such relief came to San Francisco on Wednesday with the opening of "Slava's Snowshow" in the Best of Broadway series at the Golden Gate Theatre. It's more than just a good excuse to get out of the rain. The clowns are funny and forlorn. The design is enchanting. The climax is a bust-out party offering every inner child in the house a chance to act out with gleeful abandon. And the snow -- the prevailing weather inside the Golden Gate -- is blessedly dry.
So is much of the humor -- sometimes dry in a playfully surreal, Fellini-esque mode; more often in the how-could-things-get-worse tradition of much Russian humor, our own silent film comedies and the plays of Samuel Beckett. Then there are times when the dryness is merely arid, or was on opening night. Even after the many years that Slava Polunin -- the master clown known as Slava, who created, continually re-creates and stars in the show -- has been touring his "Snowshow" around the world, parts of it seemed underdeveloped Wednesday.
A caveat is in order before we go any further. The "Snowshow" I saw may be different from the one seen on any other night, let alone the one that's still enjoying a long run off-Broadway -- though now without Slava. As he's said in many interviews, Slava considers "Snowshow" a constant work-in-progress, and has since he began performing it (under the name "Yellow") in Russia in '93 (parts of it have been featured in Cirque du Soleil's "Alegría" since '94).
He reportedly reshuffles the cast nightly, reassigning roles among the nine other clowns in the cast (not all of whom perform each time), to keep things fresh. Even Rastyam Dubinnikov's classic slapstick, meteorological sound cues and musical selections may differ from one performance to the next. Though Victor Kramer is credited as director, Slava is continually restaging the show.
The snow, however, is a constant -- as are the stars and moons that are prominent features of Victor Plotkinov's delightful design scheme, and the colorful array of large and larger balls (or planets) that bombard the audience in the riotous finale. The snow is already piled in drifts throughout the theater before the show begins, glowing in the blue wash of Oleg Iline's lights. The walls are covered in child-fantasy deep blue quilts of starry skies and occasional slivers of moon -- the same panels, in beguilingly different sizes, that make up the stage backdrop.
A cosmic clash of sound, a puff of smoke, and Slava appears -- a classic woebegone tramp-clown in baggy, bright yellow spacesuit, fluffy red slippers and scarf, big red nose, deeply hollowed eyes and great puffs of white hair accenting his bald pate. His mastery is as immediately apparent as the long rope he drags behind him and the noose around his neck. Working with the rope, executing a variety of funny walks, growing or shrinking within his suit to seemingly impossible degrees, he's instantly magnetic, a charismatic master of evoking hilarity with great economy of gesture.
Several of the other clowns in the company are wonderfully proficient as well, such as the green-garbed figure (part of the Green Team) in a funny, extra-broad floppy hat and ridiculously long shoes who mirrors Slava's movements from time to time. But some of their routines didn't come off particularly well on opening night, such as one green clown's bit with a pet balloon and talking kazoos, or a long musical number for three yellow-clad clowns -- each of which dragged on too long without much of a payoff.
But then, payoff isn't the point for most of the routines, or for "Snowshow" itself. Slava works in a kind of existential comedy realm where a dream of sailing away on a bedstead boat -- with a broom for a bowsprit and the pipe in your mouth as a smokestack -- may encounter watery floors and a passing shark. Or where great sheets of cobwebby cotton may descend to envelop a clown, and much of the audience as well.
Time, it turns out, is as mercurial as every other aspect of reality in this world. Stay too long in the lobby at intermission and you'll find that the clowns have gone on without you -- descending into the audience to walk the armrests, plop in laps and polish bald heads. Once the blizzard hits and the big bouncing balls fill the house, it's hard to tell when the show actually ends. The clowns stand onstage watching the audience take over, jostling and leaping to bat the giant orbs around.
The mere act of jumping about, arms raised, in a big crowd creates a sense of euphoria (as it does in that other touring clown show, "Aga-Boom," which played the Alcazar Theatre in December). You don't have to attend "Snowshow" to experience that. But you have to go to enjoy Slava's inspired clowning and the enchanting spell his show can weave.
posted by Sarah at 9:34 AM
1 Comments:
Best show I've seen all year. I couldn't sleep that night because I just kept thinking about it...
Thank you thank you thank you for taking me.
Post a Comment
<< Home