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New York Theatre Guide
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Holli
Harms

November 14, 2019

You see, it’s like this: Slava Polunin is back in New York and you MUST see him. Slava’s Snowshow needs to be on the top of your holiday list of shows. It will remind you about the beauty of our world. About simple acts of love and kindness. It is the epitome of empathy, vulnerability, and childlike wonderment. The clown, the pantomime, is unsurpassable in their ability to surprise through what can only be described as magic in expressing the musicality of life, the beautiful singular moments in the everyday.

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New York Theater
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Jonathan
Mandell

November 14, 2019

In the 26 years since the Russian clown Slava Polunin began touring, “Slava’s Snowshow” has been performed “thousands of times to millions of people in hundreds of cities,” according to the playbill. It doesn’t mention how much confetti, water and fusillades of giant beach balls have been dumped on, squirted, and shot at audiences. I’d say tons just in the performance I saw at Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theater, where the silly, wordless, plotless, pointless and popular 90- minute show (plus intermission) is running through January 5.

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November 14, 2019

The interval is when things go really crazy. It’s not just that the clowns in Slava’s Snowshow start clambering over the audience in the stalls of Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theatre (to Jan. 5, 2020), but they start drenching everyone with water spinning in airborne cartwheels from their umbrellas. They sit on laps, can’t work out which way they want to go, drape themselves everywhere, get stuck, and then scraps of paper start being thown. Merry chaos. So if you’re getting a seat at Slava’s Snowshow go for the front to middle of the stalls, for the full messy glory of it. Oddly, this bananas slapstick isn’t the distinguishing feature of the show, it is the clowning itself. Led by the show’s creator, Slava Polunin, who enters the stage pulling something on a rope, these clowns look and act sad, then menacing, then happy, then sad again. The audience revels in it all, and their mischief.

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November 14, 2019

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.

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