Sân khấu Kiss of the Sea — Nụ hôn của biển cả

The stage behind Kiss Bridge (Cầu Hôn)

Nine in the evening in Sunset Town. The sunset over Kiss Bridge (Cầu Hôn) has faded completely, and the crescent-shaped grandstand, five thousand seats facing the sea, slowly fills. In front of the audience, just behind the two-armed bridge whose arms never touch, stand three domes built on the water. For thirty-one minutes, water, fire, lasers, light and fireworks tell a love story. The show is called Kiss of the Sea.

The stage came before the show. On the evening of 23 December 2022, Sun Group launched Kiss the Stars, a twenty-five-minute multimedia show on a water screen of nearly one thousand square metres, while Kiss Bridge was still unfinished. A little over a year later, on the evening of 26 January 2024, Kiss of the Sea officially opened together with Kiss Bridge and the Vui Phết night market, the fourth product Sun Group brought into the entertainment area at Sunset Town. The new show closes with fireworks every night.

The show was built by ECA2, a French production company that has made more than sixty shows in seventeen countries: Wings of Time in Sentosa, Singapore; The Legend of Pangu in Lanzhou, China; the opening ceremony of the 1998 World Cup; the Beijing 2008 Olympics. ECA2 chairman Jean-Christophe Canizarès calls Kiss of the Sea the company’s newest and biggest project.

Mộc, Kim and a villain named Hỏa

The narrator is Aqua, a member of a spaceship crew. Aqua and a girl named Kim are travelling across the galaxy when they run into Faio, who wants to destroy and rule the planets. In the middle of the battle, their ship is sucked into a black hole. When they wake, they find themselves on an island full of sun, wind and sunsets: Phú Quốc.

On the island they meet Mok, a local young man, and his dog Khee. Mok tells the two visitors about the land of Hòn Thơm, Phú Quốc. Peace does not last long before Faio catches up. The wind rises, the waves swell, Faio roars and spits streams of boiling lava. The three join hands, determined to protect this planet. In the final battle, Aqua and Kim pass all their energy to Mok, and Faio falls before the power of unity. When the fighting is over, love blossoms between Mok and Kim.

The characters’ names are a play on words. Mok is Mộc (Wood), Faio is Hỏa (Fire), Aqua is Thủy (Water), Kim is Kim (Metal), the old woman Gaia is Thổ (Earth), and the dog Khee is Khí (Air): the whole story is built on the five elements. Aqua is a dugong, a critically endangered sea cow, and Khee is a Phú Quốc dog, a breed found only on the island. The character designs draw on the art of shadow puppetry. At the very start of the show, Mok’s conical hat is blown away by the wind; and in the end, the lovers find each other again at Kiss Bridge, right behind the stage.

A theatre with piles driven into the seabed

The stage is made of three projection domes in a row, the largest thirty metres high and sixty-five metres wide. ECA2 calls it the first stage in the world with three projection domes side by side. Between the domes is a water screen one thousand square metres wide; the effects sometimes shoot fifty to sixty metres high and spread one hundred and twenty metres across the sea. The curved domes were made by hand in a workshop near Hà Nội.

The water for the show is seawater. Five thousand cubic metres are pumped in through a pipe laid three hundred metres offshore, filtered, held in four tanks to adjust the water level, then released back into the sea. The seabed here is weak, so the stage foundations had to be driven nearly thirty-five metres deep. More than three hundred devices control the fire, water, light, lasers and fireworks; the projectors and lights use laser sources to save electricity. Sun Group invested 1,600 billion đồng in the project.

On the evening of 23 April 2025, Guinness World Records recognised Kiss of the Sea as the world’s largest permanent water projection theatre, with 5,108 seats and a screen twenty-three metres high and forty-four metres wide. It is Việt Nam’s first open-air theatre to hold a Guinness record, and Phú Quốc’s second Guinness record after the Hòn Thơm cable car. Earlier, in November 2024, the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) gave the show a Thea Award for Outstanding Achievement in the live event category.

Sixty dancers and seven minutes of fireworks

On the water-soaked stage are sixty performers from twenty countries, all of them trained as ballet dancers. They rehearsed for more than seven months before going on stage, each on an individual diet matched to the training schedule. The costumes are tailored to each performer, made of light, thin imported fabric and dried after every night so the performers can dance among the columns of water in comfort. Behind them is a crew of more than three hundred people.

The show’s emotions move from a peaceful shoreline, through the clash between fire and water, to a victory fireworks finale. The seven minutes of fireworks were designed especially for Kiss of the Sea and fired in time to a medley of songs such as We Are the Champions, Dancing Queen and Mamma Mia. Because there are fireworks every night, Phú Quốc is jokingly called the island of three hundred and sixty-five days of fireworks.