By Joe Brown (contact)

Wed, Feb 13, 2008 (2 a.m.)

Publicity Photo

Fan Yang, wielding custom-built wands and PVC pipes, levitates bubbles, plants bubbles within bubbles, and coaxes and choreographs bubbles.

Busted: The Strip’s latest entry in the what-to-do-with-the-kids sweepstakes, the “Mega Bubble Show” at the Steve Wyrick Theatre at Planet Hollywood, is a bunch of hot air.

The show’s creator, Fan Yang, is the real-life Mr. Bubble, holder of 15 Guinness World Records, the Thomas Kinkade of soap and water. During the show’s hour, we will learn that bubbles contain life lessons (“a bubble will cross boundaries and not discriminate against anyone”) and that it’s difficult to convince your wife’s family that blowing bubbles can be a valid career path.

Backed inexplicably by a pair of unlighted Christmas trees and working from a wheeled mad-scientist setup containing soap-filled pans and platforms with jewelry store uplighting, Yang is forever blowing bubbles. Using his hands, custom-built bubble wands and PVC pipes, he levitates bubbles, implants opalescent bubbles within transparent bubbles, coaxes and choreographs amoebic bubbles that merge and jiggle in biomorphic towers.

There are many moments of simple happiness and evanescent, iridescent beauty (don’t blink!), when the hallucinatory colors swirl on the crystalline, curvilinear surfaces like a ’60s psychedelic light show. But the brief beauty is blown away by banks of green lasers and stage smoke and an overly loud soundtrack of amped-up Enya and her New Age ilk. Soapy water — even specially formulated — is an unreliable artistic medium, and Yang often has to keep trying till he gets his desired effect, then emphasizes each completed stunt with gymnastic arm gestures.

On opening night, kids in the audience particularly enjoyed watching their peers onstage. At one point, a quartet of kids was encased in an enormous shimmering cocoon, and the young crowd cheered on one irrepressible girl who could not, would not stop herself from bursting Yang’s bubble.

But the rest is awkward filler, including a lengthy promo reel — why do we need to be enticed to watch the show when we’re already there? — and a video clip of Yang trying to encase Paula Abdul in a giant bubble. Which seems sort of redundant.

Just a few minutes into the “Mega Bubble Show,” it becomes apparent that bubble-blowing is one of many activities — flying kites, raising sea monkeys — that are really fun only for the person actually doing them.

It’s aimed at kids, obviously. But most members of the target audience have an attention span approximately equal to the life span of a soap bubble, and these 65 minutes feel so pokey and padded that many youngsters may learn how to tell time before they leave.

At $32.50 to $69.50 (not counting the $20 it’ll cost you to get your picture taken inside a giant bubble, and the inevitable Unbubblelievable Bubble Maker on sale in the lobby, this overblown science fair exhibit is not worth the money. (It was amusing to watch a pair of twenty-something guys re-creating the show in the Planet Hollywood parking lot, blowing cigarette smoke through their free sample bubbles over a garbage can.)

Still, unlike many fly-by-night entertainments on the Strip, the “Mega Bubble Show” really does stick with you. For several days after the performance I was still finding specks and flecks and blobs of bubble gunk on my shoes and pants and jacket.