Smile of Angkor — Grand Apsara Show
Smile of Angkor — Grand Apsara Show
Smile of Angkor is Siem Reap’s biggest stage production — a 70-minute epic performed nightly by a cast of up to 104 dancers, acrobats and martial artists, with laser projection, a full lighting rig and a live-scale set. If the intimate hotel Apsara dinners are chamber music, this is the symphony.
The show premiered in November 2010 and has run almost every night since, which makes it one of the longest-running productions in the city. It is staged at the Angkor COEX — the Siem Reap Exhibition Centre — on Apsara Road, just north of the Apsara roundabout near Charles de Gaulle Boulevard.
The production is built as a journey through Khmer history and myth, told in six movements. It moves from the Churning of the Sea of Milk — the Hindu creation myth carved along the walls of Angkor Wat itself — through the rise of the empire, classical Apsara dance, Khmer martial arts, village life and festival, to a closing tableau built around the serene stone faces of the Bayon: the smile the show is named for.
Doors and the buffet dinner open from around 6:00pm; the performance itself begins at 7:15pm and runs to roughly 8:25pm. Tickets are sold with or without the buffet, and children under 12 are half price. Book ahead in high season — this is a large theatre, but it fills.
It is unashamedly a spectacle, and that is the point. For a first-time visitor who wants the sweep of Khmer culture in one sitting — and who has spent the day among the temples that the show is about — it lands. Go on a night when you have already seen Angkor, and the connections do the work for you.
