Music for Circuses in Peril: Forget “Original” Scoring, Give ‘Em Songs They Love Coming In

Update: 7.30.20: I just watched a video promo on Paulo Circus Facebook. The music is absolutely wonderful -- the kind of music I speak of  herein as a subset.   

Revised 7.25.20

If you can’t dazzle their eyes with your every act, maybe their ears?

     OVER IN BRITLAND, where industrious circus lords are feverishly at work  re-inventing formats to protect patrons from the curse of Corona, I’d say the element most likely to win over a crowd is to promise a score loaded with familiar songs.  Paulo Circus is doing just this by ballyhooing a focus on pop favorites from the 1980s.

     THE '80s GAVE us, among a great many hits grounded in rock, newer sounds that broke free of rock.  Sounds pulsed by the residual force of disco, deepened in soulful thought. Many marked by richly atmospheric arrangements.  Most of my favorites from this subset, listed below, reached #1 on Billboard charts.

       INDEED, THE BRITS were major if not prime contributors to music of the '80s that moves me the most. Heat Wave's composer and keyboardist Rod Temperton  (Boogie Nights) wrote three of  Michael Jackson's biggest hits -- Off the Wall, Rock With You, and Thriller.   Hated by musicians, if the music of Gloria Gaynor and the Bee Gees "died" in 1979,  as gleefully reported by its critics, I would argue that many of the best songs of the 80's owe their heritage to disco.

      ONTO THE DISTANT PAST:  Until the advent  in recent times of original scoring — partly undertaken to avoid ASCAP and BMI royalty fees —  circuses gave the public wide ranging charts favoring mostly pop hits, a few classic refrains, and the expected thunder of marches and gallops — “circus music.”

     IN MY COPY of the Ringling program magazine for the year 1932, whomever purchased it obviously gave music a big part of his/her enjoyment, for over many displays are written in the titles of songs played, among them, Keep on Smiling, Indian Love Call, Just a Shanty in Old Shanty Town, Wash Board Blues,  Can We Talk it Over.  Bandmaster Maestro Merle Evans knew how to reach a crowd --- Although I'm not sure if the Beetles ever reached him.  Yesterday?  Norwegian Wood?

     AND HE STILL rode modern when I arrived on the scene years later.  How much more wonderful was it to watch Gina Lipkowska dancing in a circle of horses while the band played “A Stranger in Paradise.”  To hear “A Wonderful Day Like Today” as ballet girls in small white frosty roll-on carts were rolled into the arena for their aerial ballet, Winter Wonderland.  Suave tiger man Charlie Bauman was one season atypically serenaded by "The Shadow of Your Smile."  The Stephenson’s dogs were never more exciting than when Evans gave them “That’s Entertainment.”  For they -- still  the best damn dog act I ever saw -- were entertainment.  Cole Porter’s passionate "So in Love" drove the high-flying swings and dives of aerial thriller Gerard Soules.

     SPRINKLED THROUGH the show's 1956 score, John Ringling North featured the songs of Broadway and pop music king, Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls).  And North cast the elephants in a modern romp, Ringling Rock N' Roll. 

     OF COURSE, pop music is ever changing, so current or still radio-hot charts will no doubt thrill younger ears more than the older tykes.  No way of getting around it —  unless, as Evans and those of his school did, your musicians (or CDs)  draw from melody over time.

     HERE ARE SOME of my '80s favorites on a highly selective tape I made while then  living in L.A.: Sade's Smooth Operator (right); Pet Shop Boys Western Girls, Jackson's Billie Jean, Mr. Mister's Broken Wings, Paul Hardcastle's Rainforest, George Michael's Careless Whisper, Tears for Fears Everybody Wants to Rule the World,  Chaka Khan's Ain't Nobody, Billy Ocean, No More Love on the Run.  Some of the greatest pop music ever composed -- the tape still dazzles my ears.

     May those songs and others rock your park-around tent, Paulo people!