We Must Risk Delight: A Review of Club Clown

​Club Clown is less a traditional show and more of an experience: a surreal, wildly interactive celebration of laughter, music, improvisation, and the simple joy of allowing yourself to be ridiculous with a room full of strangers.

Club Clown
Presented by Sacred Fools Theater Company
Created, directed, and hosted by Will Thomas McFadden
Produced by Sidney Edwards and Scott Leggett
The Broadwater Main Stage
1076 Lillian Way, Hollywood, CA 90038
​Featuring a rotating cast of Hollywood Fringe performers
Tickets and information: Available here

“We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment.”
Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”

When you walk into Club Clown, you are handed a neon glowing wand, your magic tool for interacting with the show and its performers, and greeted with a warm welcome to what is billed as the most exclusive nightclub in Los Angeles. At least, that is the premise of Sacred Fools Theater Company's latest offering at this year's Hollywood Fringe Festival.

What happens next is harder to describe, mostly because this is the kind of show you should experience with an open mind and a willingness to get caught up in its delightful absurdity. Will Thomas McFadden created, directs, and hosts the production, a surreal and highly interactive clown experience featuring a rotating cast of some of Los Angeles's most talented improvisers and Fringe performers.

Produced by Sidney Edwards and Scott Leggett, the show promises a different lineup each night, meaning no two performances will ever be exactly alike. McFadden serves as the master of ceremonies and the audience's guide through the chaos. A masterful raconteur, he has the difficult task of making an increasingly unpredictable evening remain cohesive. He keeps the room engaged from the moment the audience arrives, confidently steering the night through more than an hour of comedy, music, audience interaction, and wonderfully strange characters.

I am hesitant to reveal too much because discovering the world of Club Clown is part of the fun. The less you know going in, the more rewarding it will be to surrender yourself to the experience. What I can say is that the show is consistently funny, impressively constructed, and completely committed to its own joyful sense of nonsense.

Less a traditional show and more of an effervescent, slightly fever-dream-like experience, that is to say, this doesn't still have all the makings of a great production. The rotating cast is excellent. The direction is confident. The technical cues are timed well and keep the evening moving smoothly, while the superb music keeps the vibe intact. Even when the show seems to be gleefully spiraling out of control, it never feels off the rails. The performers make great use of the Broadwater Main Stage, and the audience becomes an essential part of the performance rather than a group of passive observers.

To my delight, I found it exceedingly wholesome and almost healing to be in a room full of strangers who had collectively agreed to wave glowing wands, laugh loudly, embrace the ridiculous, and fully participate in the experience together. The phrase "joy is an act of resistance" has not left my mind since seeing the show. For about an hour and a half, the production allows you to push back against the terrors of the world outside the theatre through laughter, music, play, and the simple act of being present with the people around you.

We are living through a moment when many of our neighbors are afraid to walk outside their doors because of ICE enforcement. Trans people and the broader LGBTQ+ community are being targeted by a government increasingly comfortable using fear, exclusion, and Christian nationalist rhetoric as tools of control. The world gives us no shortage of reasons to feel exhausted, angry, and overwhelmed. In that context, Club Clown feels like balm for the soul. I left the theatre feeling renewed and in a much better mood than when I arrived.

By the end of the show, the separation between the performers and the audience disappears. The room begins to hum in unison, feeling almost like an impromptu congregation. Not an act of worship per se, but something certainly adjacent to it: a group of strangers briefly gathered together in celebration of the strange, the silly, and the deeply human need to experience joy together.

If this message resonates with you and you are curious about how you can participate in joy as an act of rebellion against the world around us, Club Clown is a must-see. Each performance features a different rotating cast of Fringe performers, making it worth visiting more than once for a fresh, unique experience.
​
For anyone interested in exploring these ideas more deeply, I also recommend the NPR podcast Code Switch episode "Is Joy an Act of Resistance?" hosted by Leah Donnella and B.A. Parker. The episode thoughtfully explores what it means to treat joy as a tool for social change, especially when joy itself can feel increasingly difficult to access. I also enjoyed diving into adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, a thoughtful exploration of pleasure, joy, and liberation.