The cues come as fast as flakes in a blizzard for Slava’s Snowshow.
Slava’s Snowshow is a theatrical free-for-all unlike anything else you’ve experienced. Russian clowns play tricks on each other, parody famous cinematic moments, wander through a winter wonderland and even invade the audience and heckle the crowd during intermission. For two years now the comedic and semi-improvisational show has delighted audiences at the Union Square Theatre near Greenwich Village, and lighting director Derek Brashears has been there since day one, from unloading the truck to learning the lighting design to manning the boards. He’s learned to weather a storm of surprises that can happen on a dayto- day basis, so much so that the connection is somewhat telepathic.
“The cast rotates almost every day, but it’s not a nightmare,” explains Brashears, a former freelance carpenter and electrician who also worked as a TD at a small Brooklyn theatre prior to entering the world of Snowshow. “I’ve gotten to the point where my hands and my eyes are linked up so that they know someone’s traveling from there to there, and my hands know how much that is. They just kind of sync up without me realizing it anymore.”
The premise of Snowshow is simple. The various clowns, lead by a yellow clown, perform scripted routines with improv elements — two people lost at sea; a clown reenacting a conversation between quarreling lovers (but done with babbling as opposed to clear speech); and a group of clowns pranking one another. With certain segments expanded or shortened depending upon the yellow clown’s mood that night, and with no stage manager on the production, Brashears has to be constantly aware of what is going on.
“The way the show runs is fairly organic,” he says. “The lighting is live mix, so it’s not hitting the ‘Go’ button like most shows are. I’m live-mixing channels and submasters, and as a result of that they brought in their lighting designer Oleg Iline, who was there for about three weeks to a month when the show first opened. I trained with him. His light plot was drawn on the first day of hang on a piece of notebook paper, and that was the only really useful for channel information. Mostly he stood under the pipes, pointed up and said he wanted a light there.”
Brashears runs an ETC Express 24/48 console with “absolutely no cues programmed into the board.” He lights the show predominately with Source Four ellipsoidals, of which there are close to 150. “Those are the front light, the side light, specials and lights in the house,” he remarks. “There are two things going on with back light. There are the actual back and top lights, which are all 2K Fresnels, and then there are the PAR 64s focused on the blue legs.” For color wash, he uses primary colors: Lee 119 for blue, Lee 106 for red, and Lee 179 for yellow. Blue is used during the snow scenes, while red is used during a fog sequence.
The various effects used in the show include haze, fog, dry ice, bubbles, Mylar rain, confetti snow, wind and smoke charges. The confetti is a fire retardant tissue paper that covers much of the stage by the middle of the show and gradually makes its way into the audience up to the show’s climactic blizzard. (You’ll feel sympathy for whoever has to clean it all up later.) The confetti snow is used primarily in two scenes: one where the clowns walk through the snow, with one pushing a giant snowball, and the final storm. “In terms of it being all over the stage all the time, it’s there for the look. It’s there to create the environment. You just embrace the fact that it is there, that the floor is going to change its color halfway through the show.”
Another striking element on stage is the “walls,” which are homemade creations of fabric and cotton bedding. They are suspended from the ceiling and feature one light-colored side and one dark. They are lit from above so that one can catch the detail on them. “They’re just down lit. Automatically by doing that you get the shape of them, the fact that they’re billowy.” He adds that effects like bubbles or the appearance of a clown in a translucent ball does not generate any unwanted reflections. They just add to the atmosphere of the show.
According to Brashears, Slava’s Snowshow has only a few lighting positions. “There’s the white front light, white side light, white high sides, blue sides, yellow sides, and then there’s blue top light, blue back light, red back light and white top light. The PAR cans that are focused on the legs are all blue.” Then there is a giant, glowing yellow ball that protrudes from backstage for a short period during the show, but the operation of this ominous orb, which is under control of the lighting console, is a trade secret that cannot be surrendered.
In terms of the basic cue sheet, Brashears says that, printed in 10-point font, it runs nine pages long — and that is without the “little, nuance-y cues” he does as well (not to mention the individual changes per clown). This cue sheet is given to people training as a substitute. It’s no wonder the training period lasts a month.
“For instance, you’ll have a cue where you have to fade up two submasters at different rates as the clown walks across the stage,” says Brashears. “When he reaches a certain point you stop, but you want to be about 50% at that point. Then he walks again, and by the time he finishes you want to be at 100%. Some days he’ll go fast, some days he’ll stop three times for no reason, and some days he’ll go really, really slow. So it’s always changing.”
The improv moment that caught Brashears most off-guard occurred when Slava himself was still doing the show (before embarking on a national tour of the production). He came out and did the show’s death scene with two fake arrows protruding from his body, but he decided to shorten things up a bit. “It normally goes through the whole first verse of the accompanying music where he’s on stage dancing around, and the second verse he goes into the audience. Slava was already on the ground dying — he had already done his thing onstage and been through the audience — by the end of the first verse.” Both Brashears and sound supervisor Keith Rubinstein quickly transitioned to the next segment.
“Honestly, the biggest challenge is when the scenes change, and you don’t know about it until it’s happening,” remarks Brashears. “The clowns are allowed to improv a little, and some of them are encouraged to. So the scenes will change, and you kind of reach a point some nights where you think, ‘What is going on? Okay, I’m going to cover it this way!’ The simplest example of that is when someone in the audience is laughing inappropriately or their cell phone goes off, and the clown runs into the house and starts going after the person. The immediate thing you do is bring up your house lights. It’s the best way to cover that. I’ve had scenes where there was supposed to be one clown on stage in a spotlight, like during the scene where he cleans off the stage with a broom. I’ve had other clowns show up in the middle of that. The advantage of it being a live mix show is that you can instantly bring things up and make things look good in this new version of the show that we’re doing tonight and tonight only.”
Brashears relishes the chance to delve into the pandemonium of Slava’s Snowshow each and every night. “Chaos is so much fun,” he says. “There’s something brilliantly nice about the fact that we’re sitting there and not hitting one button every night. We have no stage manager, no one calling any of the cues and no Clear-Com, so the basic rule of the show is that you have to know it.” Plus, the lack of completely defined cues is no problem. “There’s no worrying that I’m going hit ‘go’ and it’s going to be bad, or the next time I hit ‘go’ I forgot to clear something.”
And he has a technical compatriot right alongside him in Rubinstein. “We’re in the same booth. We’ve been sitting next to each other for two years. It gets to a point where even with the controlled chaos, Keith and I don’t need to speak in order to run the show together. Even when it’s an improv moment, we kind of know what the other one’s going to do.”
The Snowshow lighting director stresses that the improvisational aspects of the show have more to do with timing than with radical scene rewrites, but they are enough to keep the production challenging on a nightly basis. It also means that audiences can return and not see the exact same show. “I have seen Slava do the show in an hour and 10 minutes, including intermission,” reveals Brashears. “He was bowing at 9:15, but then I’ve seen another performer, Robert, bow at 10:15, and he did one scene less. It’s all in the timing.”
