Aga-Boom

When Ukrainian clown Dimitri Bogatirev and his wife, Iryna Ivanytska, left a combined 20 years of performing with Cirque du Soleil, they imagined a new show fusing mirthful elements of Cirque, Blue Man Group, and De La Guarda. For the kids, Aga-Boom is 80 minutes of full-throttle fun, with inner-tube hula hooping, dirty-shoe sniffing, suitcase twirling, toilet-paper tossing, balloon bouncing, and pounds of paper to throw around. For adults it's a surrealist, acid-trip vision of garbage bags walking on stilts, phallic jokes, and twisty-girl Tatiana Gousarova morphing herself into unearthly creatures in one of the most mesmerizing and original contortion acts around. From the moment Ivanytska first shuffles onstage in oversize slippers as the sweetly curious Boom and presses a big, irresistible button marked "Do Not Touch," she adeptly weaves a web of wonderment and holds the audience through the finale, as the grown-ups get buried in paper and bonked by mammoth balloons and the tykes jump out of their seats with hysterical glee.