Slava was previously announced to slide into New York five years ago. The production had been scheduled to move into the Belasco Theatre on Oct. 13, 1998, for a run through Dec. 27, but the show was indefinitely postponed. No theatre has been named for the 2004 engagement, which would come during the Broadway season's most highly trafficked time. Foster said a U.S. tour would begin in March 2004, with Broadway as its end.
Among Polunin's many visual feats are one in which he boards a train and then becomes the train, with smoke billowing out of his top hat. In another, he gets stuck in a web of unspun cotton and clambers over the seats in the auditorium, taking the web with him, until it envelopes much of the audience. In the show's most talked-about scene, he tears a letter into pieces, the bits turn into snow flakes, the flakes become a blizzard and gradually the entire auditorium becomes a raging, whirling, blinding storm that engulfs the audience knee-deep in snow.
