If you’re a kid or the kid in you is still hyperactive, you’re likely to fall in love (again?) this holiday season with Slava’s Snowshow, which returns to New York City for the first time since 2008. That’s after the Moscow-created entertainment took the town by (snow)storm in 2004.
Slava Polunin—who bills himself as scenographer, meaning he takes care of sets, costumes, and so on—heads a colorful production boasting a squad of clowns who caper in either lumpy and bulky sunshine outfits or in green get-ups with fake-fur-lined gray hats the earflaps of which stick out like airplane wings.
Throughout, the motley crew, drawn performance to performance from a dozen raring-to-go players, contend mightily with the on-stage wintry weather or rise above it in varying degrees of merriment or melancholy. They cavort thusly without ever uttering a single word and while goofy music plays almost nonstop.
The cast members currently supporting Slava’s high-and-low-jinx are: Artem Zhimo, Robert Saralp, Vanya Polunin, Georgiy Deliyev, Aelita West, Bradford West, Alexandre Frish, Nikolai Terentiev, Francesco Bifano, Spencer Chandler, and Elena Ushakova. At the performance I saw the two yellow clowns were Slava Polunin and Zhimo, and the main green clown was Saralp. My educated guess is that things are topping no matter the contingent on any given night.
Sometimes the clowns egg each other on. Sometimes they are in accord. Sometimes they look to compete. Sometimes they just stand about to be noticed. Sometimes, acting alone or in unison, they engage the audience in just about any manner imaginable. Oh, yes, wary patrons, Slava’s Snowshow is consistently immersive—whether you like it or no. And they don’t wait for you to come to them. They come to you. One neat trick is dropping thousands of paper shards on the audience. Once the multiplying snowflake wannabes are strewn everywhere by a heavy wind. Make that wind machine. (Woe betide the Stephen Sondheim Theatre cleanup staff.)
Sometimes gauzy sheets are pulled over patrons’ heads as they remain seated and getting a kick out of the conceit—or just tolerating the inconvenience. To begin the second act (it’s a two-hour, one-intermission snow show) the clowns in protruding-wing hats clamber over the audience seats. For extra added fun some of them swing uncapped bottles of water. Done with that, they line up to lift their arms and drop them. It’s their encouragement for all spectators to ooh, aah, and aww, and then stop. N.b.: Audience members are not monitored for compliance.
For part of the remaining second act, the sad-eyed Slava does things like trying to communicate with who-knows-who over a pair of big fat telephones (one yellow, one red) with loud, raspy dials that the sound designer (Slava?) supplies. Slava’s solo clown’s segments during this stretch are interrupted once by the second clown in yellow. He’s seated on a chair balancing precariously at an angle. The chair sits alongside a table balancing at the same angle. And guess what!
So it goes to the delight of many, certainly to the delight of most of the children present. (Slava’s Snowshow is recommended for age 8 and above.) But as suggested at the top of this review, the ideal patron is either 8, 7, 6, or 5, or is an adult whose inner child still wants to play with the hastily unwrapped toys the young’uns have already abandoned on Christmas morning.
Sorry to say it looks as if I’m not one of the latter group. My 2004 and 2008 recollections—general rather than specific—run to the four-star or even five-star ranking. Evidently, however, the kid in me is now in his 20s and not so starry-eyed. He’s snowed by some of Polunin’s whimsical notions but finds others less enthralling than they are sledding towards the tedious.
Nevertheless, Slava’s Snowshow is a show you don’t forget so easily, if only because of the square and rectangular paper snowflakes that cling to your head and your clothes way past the time you’ve skipped out of the theater and reached home. I found one unmelted snowflake on my living room floor the next morning.
Slava’s Snowshow opened Nov. 14, 2019, and runs through Jan. 5, 2020, at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. Tickets and information: slavaonbroadway.com
