Nestruck found Evanescent’s bubbles, presented by Luminato, underwhelming.Rebecca Tisdelle- Macias/Supplied
Balloons and bubbles: These are two things that are never a bust when it comes to entertaining my small children. Or so I thought until a visit to the Luminato Festival Toronto burst my own bubble this past weekend.
When it comes to balloons, Slava Polunin is, for me, the modern master of integrating them into live family entertainment. The former Cirque du Soleil clown’s famous holiday show, Slava’s Snowshow, has toured the world since 1993 – and the part that kids (and adults) always remember the most is when giant inflated balls roll out over the audience at the end.
I took my then four-year-old to see Slava’s Snowshow in Toronto in December and, while there were aspects of the production that certainly looked like a show that had been around for three decades, the finale had both of us screaming in delight as we were squashed by huge, heavy balloons and then pushed them back up into the air.
Slava’s schtick has been and continues to be much imitated. Earlier this spring, my son and I attended Bluey’s Big Play at Toronto’s Meridian Hall, a live spin-off of the popular Australian animated series for little ones.
Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of the mascot-like puppets or the use of recorded voices for them. But Bluey’s Big Plan concluded with huge, unpoppable balloons being thrown out into the audience so everyone could play, as the game is known on Bluey, “keepy-uppy.” Undeniably fun.
As for bubbles – that even more fragile cousin of balloons – performing tricks with air and soap dates back at least to the heyday of North American vaudeville. There’s a great website chronicling the history of early 20th-century bubble performers such as Hap Handy & Co. and Frank and Clara La Tour if you want to learn more about that.
But the undisputed modern “master of bubbles” is Fan Yang, who holds 18 Guinness World Records for bubble tricks and magic.
The Gazillion Bubble Show, Yang’s show that ran for more than 15 years in New York, will have its Toronto premiere at the CAA Theatre from Aug. 1 through Sept. 1, Mirvish Productions announced last week.
I showed my son (now five; time keeps ticking) some TikToks from the Gazillion Bubble Show when tickets went on sale last week – and he is already bursting with excitement.
Then, I showed him some pictures of Evanescent, an art installation from Sydney’s Atelier Situ described as a “temporary, immersive bubble-tecture” that’s on display in David Pecaut Square until June 16. (Following Luminato, from June 19 to July 30, it will be display at Arnell Plaza, Brookfield Place and First Canadian Place.)
A video of Evanescent set up in another city posted on YouTube earlier this year showed kids having a great time running around and under the installation’s bubble structures as soap bubbles blew past; the project was described as “an immersive, light and sound temporary environment that aims to capture the concept of ephemerality and transience in a visual form: the bubble.”
My son was intrigued, so we biked over this Sunday afternoon.
Perhaps I’ve become too much of a connoisseur of inflatables in recent years, but I couldn’t believe how underwhelming Evanescent’s bubbles were, with giant banners heralding Luminato’s (latest) slogan “It’s Art!” set up next to them pushing the whole experience over into the cringeworthy.
There were fewer big plastic bubbles than it seemed online – and they were too spaced out, out of sight of each other on opposite sides of the square. A dozen or so smaller bubbles were hung up separately in a concert area on a string like beach balls, but less attractive than Chinese lanterns would have been.
If there was a lighting element involved in Evanescent, it was undetectable on a grey day; as for the music, I could barely hear it over the sounds of the machines keeping the balloons inflated.
As for the immersiveness of the Atelier Situ installation, there are signs on the ground next to them making it clear that kids should be supervised and not kick or punch the bubbles. Fair enough, but a bit of a buzzkill after the chaotic fun we had at Bluey and Slava’s Snowshow (and I haven’t even got into the unappreciated art form of the bouncy castle in this essay).
My son and I quickly decamped from Luminato HQ to the Do West Fest – a street festival that takes place on Dundas West that was packed with families, and where we weren’t outnumbered by security guards and volunteers.
The highlight of the day for the kid, he told me later, was playing with one of those giant waving inflatable guys you usually see outside car dealerships that had been set up outside of a store at Do West Fest. It’s art!
Casting news
The North American tour of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child announced its cast yesterday. Trish Lindström, who played Ginny Potter in the Toronto production, will do so again as it hits the road. Other Canadians in the ensemble include Kaleb Alexander, Simon Gagnon and Alexis Gordon.
The Cursed Child tour kicks off in Chicago in September and stays there until February. It is then in Los Angeles from February to June and starts a run in Washington in July.
Four opening this week
1 & 2. It’s Bard on the Beach time in Vancouver.
Twelfth Night, in a production adapted and directed by Diana Donnelly, has its first performance tonight and runs to Sept. 21. Camille Legg stars as Viola.
Hamlet, adapted and directed by Stephen Drover and starring Nadeem Phillip Umar Khitab, has its first performance on Thursday and runs to Sept. 20.
3. Fiddler on the Roof, the great Broadway musical based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, opens at the Huron County Playhouse in Grand Bend, Ont., this week and runs to June 30. Drayton Entertainment’s head honcho Alex Mustakas is starring as Tevye.
4. Wendy and Peter Pan, British playwright Ella Hickson’s female-forward version of J.M Barrie’s classic play that debuted at the Royal Shakespeare Company a decade ago, has its North American premiere at the Stratford Festival on Saturday; it’s running through Oct. 27.
We’ve set up a Stratford Festival topic page, where you can find all our reviews of the 2024 season’s shows as they are posted online.