AGA BOOM - "Pure Family Fun" show - Direct from Las Vegas - is coming to TORONTO this December

Kids will love this clown show that uses reams of paper to generate laughter - without the paper cuts

Clown shows aren't to everyone's taste, but I didn't see a single person -- adult or child -- who sat bored during Aga-Boom, a 70-minute show that's filling the Bluma Appel Theatre with zany antics, excited kids and lots and lots of paper.

The show's title, in fact, plays with the Russian word for paper (boomaga), and that inversion of the everyday is just what Aga-Boom is about: people juggle suitcases instead of carrying them, a character's arm stretches to 10 times its normal length, a bundle of rope becomes a babe in arms.

The show is all linked together with paper, from the first visual of a crinkled backdrop and a pile of thrown-out paper that won't go away, to the final free-for-all involving paper in various shapes and huge bouncing balls which... well, you have to be there, because the audience gets involved in a back-and-forth game with the performers that leaves everyone grinning from ear to ear.

The three central clowns, trained in the eastern European tradition, know their stuff -- everything from the slyly raised eyebrow to get an audience reaction to the big pratfalls rewarded with guffaws. There's the playful, straw-haired, rubber-faced Boom (Iryna Ivanytska), the towering and only initially menacing Dash (Valery Slemzin) and  

Aga (company director Dimitri Bogatirev), a talented juggler who at times keeps so much going that you don't think about the skill necessary for him to keep objects around him airborne. And just watch the comic variations he rings on the simple attempt to fold his arms.

If you've seen Slava's Snow Show, which has played Toronto several times, you'll recognize variations on some of the bits, but they're no less entertaining here.

Aga-Boom is a nearly textless show, but it sure knows how to communicate to its audience, some of whom are pulled onstage to work with the performers. Happily, everyone's willing to take part.

What a treat to watch Soulpepper regular Oliver Dennis, one of this city's finest comic performers, brought onstage and thrust into a film sketch where he had to be taught by Aga how to "die" when shot by the glowering Dash.

It's a great holiday show for the family, but catch Aga-Boom before all the paper's swept away after Saturday's performance.

You have to love a show that transforms a somewhat stern, formal theatre such as the St. Lawrence Centre's Bluma Appel into a giant playpen.

At the end of Aga-Boom, a clown show that sadly is only in town until Saturday, giant inflatable balloons float out into the audience, to be batted around, swatted back toward the stage or propelled up into the balcony from the orchestra seats.

Children (and not just young ones) spring out of their seats to join in the fun. Everyone gets to play.

The auditorium is strewn with paper. Sheets of it are tossed back from audience row to audience row. Balls of paper are tossed back at the clowns, who catch them in a net or swipe at them with a racket. Little pieces are blown out – like a snowstorm – into the audience.

(Those with long memories will recall an even more spectacular paper blizzard at the end of Slava's Snowshow, another Eastern European clown show that played the Royal Alexandra Theatre a decade ago.)

Paper, in fact, is a recurring theme throughout Aga-Boom, created and directed by ex-Cirque du Soleil clown Dimitri Bogatirev (who plays Aga) and inspired by Iryna Ivanytska, another former Cirque star and Bogatirev's wife, who plays a character called Boom.

Paper sticks to Boom's hands and to her large furry slippers as the mop-haired clown attempts to sweep the stage. Her frustration is obvious as she attempts to seize and hold onto paper money, stretching out through the paper screen toward the back of the stage.

Ivanytska is a compelling performer.

Emotions – bewilderment, mischief, anger, joy – are written large across her face and her body language is equally eloquent.

There's lots of traditional clown stuff to enjoy – slapstick, juggling and a variety of pranks – with Aga and Dash (played by a lugubrious Valery Slemzin) working seamlessly with Boom in all the fun and games.

Audience members get to participate in the show. One is left holding the baby (in fact the head of a mop) while the clowns sneak off the stage. Others take part in a melodramatic death scene that is being directed and filmed by one of the clowns, a sequence that probably runs a little too long.

The same cannot be said about the merry mayhem at the end of Aga-Boom, however.

You just want to stay and play all day.

Aga-Boom's childlike artistry dispenses with the old seltzer-down-your-pants style of goofiness

There are some among us who simply don't enjoy watching grownups clown around and make fools of both themselves and everyone around them, regardless of how talented those doing the clowning might be. And, frankly, Aga-Boom, isn't likely to make our comedically challenged brethren think otherwise.

As for the rest of us, we should head off, lickety-scoot and without delay, to the Bluma Appel Theatre to catch Aga-Boom, the latest in a string of theatrical clown shows to hit Toronto stages that have ranged from Slava's Snow Show to The Blue Man Group.

Presented by Show One Productions, the Theatre of Physical Comedy's Aga-Boom opened Tuesday and runs only though Saturday at the Front Street Theatre.

Created and directed by Dimitri Bogatirev, who made his name clowning around with Cirque Du Soleil in shows such as Alegria and O, Aga-Boom takes its name from the show's principal characters -- Aga, played by Bogatirev, and Boom, played by his sidekick (and in a more adult guise, also his wife), Iryna Ivanytska.

Title notwithstanding, it is left to Ivanytska's Boom to open the show, a task she accomplishes with deceptive ease, using little more than a broom, a pile of paper, a bit of manufactured smoke and the obligatory winsome clown face to capture her audience and launch them on the trail to adventure.

And though it may take a while for audiences to realize it, this is not a big bold adventure of discovery, but rather a more constrained trip of rediscovery. Bogatirev and Ivanytska and their cohorts demonstrate once again the delight and power of keeping things simple, eschewing the sleight-of-hand silliness and the manufactured excess that pass too often as clowning today. Instead they embrace the rigours of everyday life, milking every single one of them to extract the last possible laugh.

The true test of a clown, it seems, is not in discovering new stories to make an audience laugh, but rather in sorting through the old and familiar aspects of our lives and making us look at them in such a way as to make us laugh. In this, the Aga-Boom team is masterful indeed.

Joined by Valery Slemzin and by little Olya Slemzin, they conspire to make us look at the world around us through the eyes of a child. Their success can be measured at every turn by the shrieks of laughter their antics elicit from the younger members of their audience -- shrieks, it might be added, that are almost drowned out by those from the adults as they move further and further into the depths of the 90-minute show.

From the almost fatal attraction to be found in a button that bears a cautionary "Do Not Touch" sign, through a silly sendup of movie making (that on Tuesday night saw one of Toronto's finest actors drawn into the melee), through to buzzy little airplanes and the over-the-top free-for-all that ends the show with happy memories of the aforementioned Slava and The Blue Man Group, Aga-Boom offers up simple delight that is -- well -- simply delightful.