Gazillion Bubble Show

Gazillion Bubble Show is a family stage show built entirely around soap bubbles. It has no plot and no dialogue to follow. Instead, for about an hour, members of one family of bubble artists create bubble tricks, shapes and sculptures to music, wrapped in lasers, colored light and video projections. The show likes to describe itself as a meeting of art and "soapy science."

It opened at New World Stages on February 15, 2007, as a test run of just nine performances, and it kept extending for almost twenty years. More than one million people have seen it in New York. The end is now in sight: the production will close on January 18, 2027, after a final Holiday Spectacular season. If you have ever wanted to see it, these are the last months to do so.

The show is a sequence of short numbers, each one bigger than the last. Bubbles are shaped into tunnels, spirals and towers, filled with smoke, stacked inside one another and lit up by lasers. Some of the most memorable moments put volunteers from the audience inside a giant bubble, and the effects regularly spill out over the seats in what the company calls 360-degree bubble storms. The grand finale floods the auditorium with laser light and wave after wave of bubbles.

Light and sound matter as much as the soap. The regular show is loud and bright: strobes flash, colored lasers sweep the room, and bubbles rise from the floor to the ceiling. Photos and video are allowed during the regular show as long as you switch off the flash.

From November 14, 2026, to January 18, 2027, the show plays its Holiday Spectacular edition, the last time the show will play the holidays in New York. It keeps the usual bubble artistry, lights, lasers, music and interactive moments and adds a festive theme. An earlier holiday version, Gazillion Bubble Snow, added winter effects and music.

The production began in 2007 as a limited engagement at New World Stages and has called the complex home ever since. It played its 1,000th performance on July 18, 2009, and had passed 3,882 performances by January 2017.

Along the way there were some odd moments. In 2008, thieves stole more than three tons of the show's bubble solution. The Yangs also became familiar faces on television: Late Night with David Letterman, Good Morning America, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Live with Regis and Kelly and The Oprah Winfrey Show all had them on.

After the pandemic shutdown, performances returned on November 5, 2021, then paused again from January 29 to April 1, 2022. In June 2026 the show announced it would close on September 7, 2026, after 19 years, by which point it would have played 6,802 performances. The company called its farewell stretch "The Summer of Bubbles" and filled it with special events and celebrations for fans. Demand for tickets was so strong after the announcement that in August 2026 the closing was pushed back to January 18, 2027, so the show can now celebrate twenty years in the city before it goes. The final performance falls on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Outside New York, Fan Yang has staged the show in Las Vegas, a version has played at the Dollywood theme park, and a touring edition led by Deni Yang visited Six Flags in Arlington, Texas, in March 2026. As of October 2026, the national tour is between engagements, with new dates to be announced, and more touring is planned once the New York run ends.

The show has no theater awards, but it does have a shelf of world records. On January 30, 2008, the family fit 100 people inside a single bubble live on The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. That April, in Perris, California, they enclosed an elephant named Tai in a bubble. In Beijing in November 2009 they made a soap-bubble wall 50.90 m long. Their 18th Guinness record came at Science World in Vancouver on September 19, 2012, when they put 181 people inside one soap bubble.