Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Jim Moore ©2025  

Something is funny in the borough of Brooklyn. The fourth annual New York Clown Theatre Festival began performances on September 3^rd with a subway parade, pie fight, and cabaret and continues through the 26^th, ending, appropriately, with a funeral procession. In between, the Brick Theater is home to 25 clown shows, ranging from family shows to street shows to clowns going through puberty, as they do in the show Orro and Jasp Do Puberty. Catch something if you can because it’s often not easy to find good clown shows.

American theater tends to rely more on verbal language than on the physical, so it’s always a treat to see anything told with few or no words.  The two clown shows I was able to see at the festival wonderfully utilized gestures, dance, props, and audience involvement. The funniest element of a clown show is often not how the clown acts but what he or she does to the audience to get them to react.  Very few audience members were left out of the performance as the clowns went up and down the aisle and in and out of rows, and they weren’t too shy to get close.

Jim Moore ©2025  

First up was Send in the Angels, a delightful 25-minute show featuring clowns Denni Dennis and Clare Parry-Jones from Wales. Dennis and Parry-Jones are two angels who want to comfort us but instead, with the best of intentions, wreak a bit of havoc, as clowns are prone to do. Objects that usually signify relaxation, such as yarn and pillows, become chaotic webs and instruments of war.  Dennis’s grinning face somewhat resembles a skeleton, but he’s more gentle than scary as he steps into the audience and holds our hands.  Parry-Jone’s face is not quite as expressive as Dennis’s, but her endearing nature and graceful movement make up for it.

The second show in this double-bill was Ferdinand the Magnificent, a portly, sweet-looking clown in a huge white diaper and hot pink body suit, played by Nick Trotter. He spends much of his 30-minute show interacting with the audience, even sneezing on a poor girl with his large prosthetic nose, although he does try to rectify the situation by giving her a cloth and a flower. When he isn’t in the audience, Ferdinand is singing and playing music from a long hose, his most engaging number being La Vie En Rose during which he chases a quickly moving spotlight. While he is fun to watch, his show ultimately falls a bit short of enchanting. Unlike the angels, he has no problematic situation to work his way out of, and after a while his act feels a little stagnant.

While the festival is already half over, there’s still plenty of time to catch many of the acts. Not every show will be a knockout, but, in the end, that’s not what’s important. The New York Clown Theatre Festival is a reminder that theater can transcend words and be more about the physical connection between the performer and the audience.