Review: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA at Pasadena Playhouse

I came home after the opening night of HA HA HA HA HA HA HA at The Pasadena Playhouse, positively giddy—but upon trying to recount the experience to my husband and tween-aged daughter, I stumbled:

Me: It’s a one-woman show… with a clown.

Daughter (with a terrified look): A clown?

Me: Not a scary clown! More like a Cirque du Soleil–style clown. She has a golden mannequin leg for an arm.

Them: (silence)

Me: She just walked around the room, trying to solve people’s problems.

Them: (silence)

Me: A guy peed in a cup on stage! Well, not in front of everyone, but…

OK. So you had to be there. 

But really: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha (playing at The Pasadena Playhouse through November 9) is good. Great, actually. 

And not just because it’s unique (a rarity these days). But because it manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and wholesomely endearing at the same time.

But, oh, it is hard to explain. 

I mean, how do you capture a show that ends with a random audience member nonchalantly disrobing and taking an actual shower on stage? How do you explain a show in which another audience member asks to use the bathroom but is instead directed backstage to pee in a cup (an assignment which he, to the audience’s perverse delight, took very seriously)?  

And how do you describe these totally improvised happenings in a way that emphasizes the show’s most magical quality: That it’s unscripted? That it makes us laugh with—but not at—each other? That it’s an exercise in empathy and the power of community?

Because it is all of those things. But, like I said, you have to see it to understand. 

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha is a one-woman show created and performed by award-winning Estonian-born clown Julia Masli, a gifted improvisational actor who conceived of the show as a way to use clowning “for healing.” The show, directed by Kim Noble, has won universal acclaim since its debut at the Edinburgh Festival  Fringe in 2023, taking home the (ISH) Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Best Show and the Comedians’ Choice Award.  

The crux of it (there is no linear story) is simple: Masli, who appears as a whimsical, otherworldly figure in blue robes, wanders up and down the aisles trying to learn about—and solve—various audience members’ problems.   

And, somehow, she does. 

Wearing a black bike helmet with a tubular coil arching up toward the ceiling and a golden mannequin leg in lieu of a left arm (this is avant-garde theater, after all), Masli glides up to her subjects, pushes a microphone toward their faces, and hums in a voice that is both ethereal and shrill:

“Prooooobbbblllleeeeemmmm?”  

Then, whatever they say, she goes with it. 

At the performance I saw, the “problems” ran the gamut from benign to profound—from a man in the front row looking for Halloween costume ideas (the audience decided on “Mrs. Doubtfire”) to a woman named Delaney who didn’t have the $4,500 needed to get dental surgery but who, by the end of the show, had more than $2,500 in her Venmo account. Stage magic, indeed. 

Side note: When I saw Delaney in the lobby after the show, she was clutching her phone, its screen open to the Venmo app as the donations climbed. She was full-out crying when she told me, “I didn’t know this was going to happen. I was not a plant.” And I believe her.

Not all problems required donations. “Danny” from the back row needed a haircut, so Masli found a capable person to do the deed on stage. “Patrick,” from the front aisle, needed a hobby and liked “to work with his hands,” so Masli dragged out a tool cart from backstage and instructed him to build something with pieces of wood left on stage from an earlier moment. 

Ultimately, while Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha is billed as a one-woman show—it’s really not one, since the very core of the show hinges on the myriad people with whom Masli chooses to share the experience. 

The set is revealed as the problems unfold: A tool rack. A bed. A shower. It’s likely some of these pieces are constants—that whatever the audience members’ problems, Masli will find a way to direct them to these props. Whatever the case, she is the orchestrator, and they are the pieces.

And it works masterfully. There was a beautifully absurd moment when a whole team of people were “performing” on stage: A child with a sleep mask lying on a bed; a woman singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” at a microphone; two men hammering chair legs, and a stage lighting technician cutting Danny’s hair (it was a fine haircut, by the way). 

Meanwhile, Masli merrily scoured the audience for more problems to solve.

Of course, the show I saw won’t be the show you’ll see, since every show’s content hinges on the various issues expressed by the audience. 

And if it all sounds terribly embarrassing for selected audience members, it somehow wasn’t. Masli’s earnest, wide-eyed approach to gathering information subverted most people’s stage fright. Not a single person at the show I attended appeared reluctant to open up. Maybe because while the “HA HA HAs” were easy to come by, there was nothing mean-spirited in any of them. Everyone was rooting for everyone.  

Also, keep in mind, it’s not a lengthy show. At 70 minutes, the whole thing runs just long enough to move past the initial “What the f**?” but short enough that you’ll be tempted to come back another night for a fresh round of it.

L.A. traffic, for instance. She didn’t solve that one yet. 

POSTSCRIPT:

I tracked Delaney Heil down the next day, and she told me she had received a total of $2,983.87 for her dental surgery—a gift she said she truly never expected.  “I was truly blown away by everyone's generosity, kindness, and humanity,” she told me in an e-mail. “The community-building and collective empathy generated from this show is why theater, especially avant-garde theater, matters.”

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