Slava's Snowshow Books the Union Square
Slava's Snowshow, named for star Slava Polunin, is both a clown-show and a visual spectacular. Inspired during his time at Cirque du Soleil, Polunin created Slava's Snowshow in 1993.He has since performed the show, which won the 1998 Olivier Award for Best Entertainment, throughout the world.
In his review of a recent U.K. mounting of Slava's Snowshow, The Guardian's Michael Billington wrote: "Never having seen this Russian clown-show before, I was also struck by how much it resembled the revues of my youth. The bombardment of the stalls with everything from water to tangled films of skein reminded me of the anarchy of the Crazy Gang. And the oddity of individual items, such as one in which a man mysteriously appears with a woman wrapped in clingfilm, took me back to Robert Dhery's surreal revue, La Plume de Ma Tante… In the show's famous climax the audience is engulfed by a blinding blizzard of simulated snow. As a coda, however, we are bombarded with vast, multi-colored balloons that we proceed to toss merrily back and forth. As I left, smile-wreathed, perfectly sane adults were still busy balloon-bashing."
The Union Square has been vacant since Yeardley Smith's More closed on April 18.