SUNDAY MORNING OUT OF THE PAST: Tough Love for Troubled Big Tops ...

From Showbiz David Shock Therapy Division, to Beleaguered Circus Owners on the Edge

I feel your pain, even if you don’t. I would like to see you succeed, even if you believe you already are. Even if you refuse to be traumatized by the thousands of empty seats you fail to fill. And so, risking a class action lawsuit for subjecting you beyond your will to my forced advice, you are hereby enrolled in my (drum roll, please!) ...

TWELVE STEP SELF-HELP RECOVERY PLAN

1. IT’S THE SHOW STUPID! No matter the venue, crowd-wowing showmanship is built on time-tested elements — swiftly paced action, smooth transitions, contrasting moods, music, lights, costumes -- all tautly shaped between sudden decisive openings (as opposed to haphazard pre-show ceremonial nonsense) and big flashy finishes. Bottom line: everything that goes on in and around your single or half ring either adds to or subtracts from the flow of action. REPEAT AND MEMORIZE: EITHER ADDS TO OR SUBTRACTS FROM THE FLOW OF ACTION. Anything that does not (to be addressed next) must go, and go NOW. We in the audience are not impressed. We see through your desperate veiled appeals for money. We do not welcome their disrupting the seductive sawdust spell you sometimes cast over us.

2. OUT, DAMN CONCESSIONS! Are you a circus or a concessionaire on the skids with a backlog of cotton candy to blow up before you blow out? If you still harbor a secret desire to be the next Royal American Carnival, I’d suggest moving your coloring book spiels, your photo ops and various rides along right now, out of the tent and onto the midway where they belong. And the moment I hear one more idiotically intrusive Peanut Peterson pitch DURING ANY PART OF YOUR PERFORMANCE, I swear, no matter the hour, no matter the place, I am getting up out of my seat with megaphone in hand, placing it up to my frothing mouth and shouting “I've heard that fifty thousand times already and I’m not gonna be pitched it anymore!”

3. CONFINE YOUR RING TO THE PERFORMANCE ONLY Money changers, out of the tent! Why? Okay, let’s think this through. A good performance creates and sustains audience engagement. Think of watching a movie in a theatre that every 10 or 20 minutes is shut down while some hack tries selling you on having a pet boa constrictor wrapped around your neck during intermission while a priest gives you last rites and your photo is taken. How might you feel, huh? Clutter your show up with junk and your audience leaves subliminally irritated by everything that got in the way of why they went there in the first place. Have I made my point yet??? They paid to see a performance, not to watch Shopping Channel Goes to the Circus. If you still don’t get it, I’d suggest simply getting out of the business.

4. RETIRE ALL "GUEST ARTISTS" TO THEIR SEATS, WHERE THEY BELONG I do not pay to see customers perform. Give them a good five years off, during which time you will relearn the art of hiring sufficient acts to entertain in lieu of filling up dead space with audience dead heads. I have yet to see a member of the paying public become part of the show in any other venue, be it a rock concert, ballet, stage show, rodeo, or public hanging. And please, will somebody tell the Shriners that we can no longer risk incalculable damage to whatever is left of clowning in American by their unwelcome holidays in greasepaint.

5. REMEMBER ATMOSPHERE? How about restoring a little, such as (and you know who you are) spreading a little sawdust or pink spray paint where the ring used to be. Or at least taking a crash course from any one of the two thousand co-founders of Cirque du Soleil who are standing by this very moment, ready to French up your operation.

6. POPCORN BY THE TON Give us a bloody break! Give us the half-ton box at half the price. You lure the public in with generally humane ticket pricing options. And then you ensnare them in your calculating concession pits, draining them of every last cent you can. I sat behind a poor woman at a small very under performing circus with her son, who kept raising the subject of popcorn. She told him she'd pop some when they got home. They did not return after intermission. Really, what do you accomplish by making it so difficult for adults with children to survive circus day? Why not a Dollar Matinee or two at the concession booth during each stand? Jack up the VIP night show prices, if you must, for rich Wall Street survival geniuses wishing to flaunt their stolen wealth in high American fashion.

7. ORGANIZE A UNIFIED MUSICAL SCORE If you can’t afford a live band (and by "live band," I am not talking accordion and/or bongo player), at least assign a real person to assemble a recorded score that is more than a juke box randomly stocked with the CDS handed you by your arriving acts.

8. PACING, PACING, PACING Remember when acts flew by? When, after one ended, somehow, someway, the next was actually somewhere inside the tent, maybe already in or over the ring performing? Return to the one-act format and concentrate your assets into a tighter, more memorable one-two wallop. Know what? If you thrill a few people, they might go out and talk up your show, and that might pull in more people to the next one. It’s called “word of mouth.”

9. OFFER A PIECE OF PAPER LISTING THE ACTS -— if that’s all you can afford. Remember the program magazines you once sold? The demise of these expected items which are still offered in virtually every other avenue of live entertainment is a tell tale sign of a big top being wheel-barrowed down the road on cherry pie life support. If you can’t hand out at least a one page flier listing the names of your performers, I’d say it’s time to consider a career change; check out some self-help gurus on PBS (Pledge Break Society) for re-birthing advice.

10. IF IT'S SOMETHING MY NEIGHBOR CAN DO, I DON'T WANT TO SEE IT IN YOUR CIRCUS I do not pay to see marbles or kick the ball, doing the daisy chain or hula hoop sleepover, thank you. Unless you can engage that true rarity -- the artist who makes me forget I'm actually watching a hula hoop act -- bring back pin the donkey.

11. RINGMASTER, HOLD YOUR TONGUE I know at least one who can’t stop talking. An immediate gag order on every gasbag announcer who thinks he or she is the real show. He or she is not. These vocal hosts should be heard briefly, and should not themselves become the show unless they have valid acts to offer. "Are you enjoying the show so far, folks?" is not a valid act.

12. IT'S NOT THE STORY, STUPID! You are not the Royal Shakespeare Company over sawdust staging Six Characters in Search of a Producing Clown. No matter what you believe, modern-day "story telling" under a tent is nothing more than big top broccoli designed to give snobs the satisfaction of having endured a quasi Cirque du Soleil out-of-body experience. If you can't resist, then tell your “story” in brief fleeting moments, so that it passes quickly enough to satisfy theatre types without in any way impeding the flow of CIRCUS action. In other words, it should have the tantalizing brevity of an old fashioned American clown walkaround. Leave’em wanting more, not less.

And on that note, I'm leaving. There's a man out there who wants to see me about ad rates. Anybody heard of Dixiana Peanuts?

2.15.09

Legendary Breakthrough at the Circus--- Dancing At Last Holds Its Own

How could it be?  How could a group of dancers ever hold their own against, if not exceed the talents of the best circus acts on the bill?

Mine eyes have seen a revelation. for the first time, four-star choreography in the ring.  

If you live long enough, you may be surprised in ways you could never have expected.  Over the years, I have seen many kinds of dancing in league with clowns and elephants. Some was good enough as filler between acts and prop changes. Some fairly pedestrian. Some, well, at least lively.  But not of a caliber you would expect to find in a professional venue centered in dance and ballet.

Until now. I'm almost afraid to re-watch the You Tube on which I discovered this, for fear I might have over-reacted. But let me leave that for now and ride the waves of something that deserves top drawer respect

These nimble dames are jazzy.  They're funky.  I see saucy shades of Fosse.

The acts between the footwork? Mostly good enough. Three stand outs include a cradle casting duo and a lovely low-wire ballerina who performs both softly and intrepidly well, and on her toes. But here is where the dancers, flapping large wings, messed up my sight lines.  I strained to see the star, and wanted to scream, off with their wings!

Weakest of all, ringmaster overkill. Best of all, wrapping the show with a smartly placed powerhouse of tumblers forming pyramids and individually taking turns thundering around the ring trough somersaults and flip flops. I could feel a hurricane of horses sweeping me away.

Okay, name of the circus?  Candyland 2024 from Zippos. A forty five minute show, easy to look up on You Tube.

 

Monday Morning Wake Up: Why I Will Not Read Battle for the Big Top ...

 You could never guess. 

I've known about  Lee Standiford's well received book, have skidded through a stream of consumer raves, hoping the local library would eventually order a copy.  It sounded like maybe a Big One. Not big enough for Oakland, half the town still behind masks, some on a waiting list for mask implants.

 So, I broke down and ordered a copy from Amazon. The moment it arrived, I opened it to find a form of type face insultingly small,worse yet, not clear black but half-dead grey.  And this, from a major publisher?  Great cover,  frugal interior design on life support.

The experts say that the publishing world is having a hell of a time, many books selling 0 copies, the average new tome, in a swampland of both traditional and self-publishing, selling around 300 to 500 copies.

I read many books, but I did not relish the thought of fighting my way across a grainy grey typeface terrain. Not unless the book were about John Ringling North or Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Here comes yet a bigger shock, for anybody who has a basic kindergarten knowledge of American circus history. While temporarily in possession of the orphan, I did a little checking to see how big a role Art Concello plays in the narrative.  So I looked for his name in the index.

Nothing!  

Heck, he was only to John Ringling North what James. A. Bailey had kind of been to P. To Barnum.  A big player.

I'll leave it at that, other to note that the book seems to cover a wider ground than what the title promises.

Cirque du Desperate? Show Now Touts Story Line and Paper Animals, Leaves Critics in a Muddle ...

Oh, those glorious days gone by when Cirque du  Soleil  need only post its name in suave newspaper ads, and the world would storm the phones to secure the priciest tickets.

And..........................now ......ECHO.  You may clip a discount coupon from your local newspaper, if you still have one and are a subscriber. This oddly and  odorouslly unfaltering discovery I came upon  by accident, in the Sunday edition of our local rag. Notice how the Montreal monster is not pushing the predictable slate of familiar acts, but, instead, a story line that reaches in many directions and features "our main female heroine, Future."  Music by /Wagner?

The amateur-looking ad, if you can read it, promises "a tale of relations and evolution's ... combining poetry, stagecraft, daring acrobatics, and technology... exploring the delicate balance between people. animals, and the world we share."  And only one word about circus -- acrobatics.

Having examined a couple of reviews, a recurring theme bleeds distress over a hodgepodge of action. Both give high marks to some of the acts, and yet differ over story elements, one terming them "compelling" despite dolling out only two stars. Both end up in a  muddle of disappointment, unable to sing Cirque's praises. Here are excerpts from the notices:

Joshua Chong in a 2-star Toronto Star review: "Echo feels like a dull whimper, quite literally confined to a box [and ]is far from the glorious comeback that Cirque du Soleil intended. Despite some stunning individual routines and a compelling story line, Echo is torn by competing artistic visions that prevent the show, [which] never comes together as a thrilling whole."   

Aisling Murphy in  Intermission:  "An echo of circuses past. Two creative visions come to a head in ECHO, and they don’t gel particularly well. On one hand, you have the ultra-sleek box and the treasures inside; on the other, you have a mysterious world of paper animals infiltrated by a blue little girl and her blue dog. Most Cirque du Soleil shows tend to wield a thin story, but ECHO is close to non-existent beyond the initial offer of a girl and her pet on an odyssey of some sort."

The show seems to be doing better with consumer reviews, but here we might be traipsing through a minefield of shilling. Luckily for me and this post, I came upon a 34 minute You Tube sampler ...

"The Best of ECHO" from Cirque du Soleil 

So I had a chance to see for myself what they are up to, that is, with respect only to acts, for there is no trace of the story telling pushed in the grim, grainy newspaper graphic above    The acrobatic action, house acts I suppose, is more roughly athletic than finished.  Iron jaw and hair hang, webs and risley and casting,  with teeter boarders getting the longest workout, refreshing to a point of redundancy.  They are stressing large ensembles, though by far the biggest  hit of the clips shown were two clown-like fellows competing to build the tallest stack of cardboard boxes.  A four-star  hoot.  A great build that goes a bit weak when the stack falls but does not come apart.

If that's the best of ECHO, what is the rest of ECHO?  I have to assume Shakespeare over sawdust. 

Here is what stuck me the most about this leaden opus.  It is cold. It is dark, literally dark. It is abstract and alienating.  Most of the cast have painted faces or wear masks.  I can well understand why the two media reviewers filed acute reservations . One of the Yelper raves talked up never having felt so satisfyingly engulfed in the  atmosphere. It is heavy, yes, I can agree, except that, unlike him, I wanted out.  This was not the feeling I recently got when I  viewed parts of other CDS shows in a one hour You Tube sampler. It seems that their reigning esthetic of the moment is to feature many people doing similar things, rather then giving focus to well honed world class acts.  The enchanting sampler left me open to taking in another Cirque show.  After watching ECHO, that desire is gone.  In fact, I would sooner go to Ringling than to Cirque.

About that embarrassing ad.  What next?  Cirque du phone room calling? 

MORNING WAKE UP, CIRCUS VERSUS THEATER: "Love, sorrow, fear, triumph or revenge cannot be interpreted by purely acrobatic movements." -- Antony Hippisley Coxe, A Seat at the Circus

Further ...

 "After his first wild leap, the acrobat forgot the cause, and, impressed by its effect, became more interested  in evolving physical variations than in trying to express different feelings by similar movements."

And the Winners Are! ...

GOLD  Turkmenistan’s Djiguite riders, China’s National Acrobatic Troupe, and the gravity-defying Flying Caballeros.

SILVER The Scandinavian Boards and the Martini Family’s enchanting exotic animals brought awe to the ring. Pastelito and Junior also earned this distinction, proving their comedic brilliance to be world-class.

BRONZE The Triple Breath High Wire trio, with their serene mastery of the tightrope, joined Duo Acero and Wolfgang Lauenburger in this category.

The Rise and Fall of North and Royal on Kelly Miller

When I think of the circus they ran together. I think of a happier time in my circus-going  days. Three reasons made the show special:

It was  owned and produced  by the House of Ringling , in the figure of  John Ringling North II. During its better, early to middle years, the acts ranged from moderately pleasing to outstanding. Show was very attractively costumed, and well ringmastered by the strong, clean, concise intros from John Moss.  Musical scores were mostly good.  Occasional Imports from abroad  –  top of the pack, a ball bouncing ladder juggler from Etheopia, Abrham Gebre,  added gold to the mix.

Another Big Plus: During those days, we were luckily given a rare insider view by  blogger Steve Copeland, who with his partner Ryan Combs, zealously infused the programs with inventive clowning. Steve’s hopelessly honest postings (actual crowd sizes and audience response, etc.) were daily must-reads.  Was he revealing too much?  The House of Ringling said, no, this is a free country, let him blog.

Don Covington photo / Bandwagon

In the middle of all this stood the imperially tall James Royal, above, general manager. America born, Jim was stricken by the bug at the age of 12, blame it on Polack at Medina Shrine in Chicago.  And seduced by Henry Ringling North’s great book, Circus Kings.

A rarity it seems, Royal would spend his years under tops big and small on both sides of the big Pond. He worked for and with some of the UK’s top circus lords, in various configurations, co-owner to marketing man. Over here, he had started out the Hoxie show, transferred to  Kelly Miller, and then ringmastered for the five rings of Carson & Barnes. From there to production unit manager for Big Apple Circus. 

Just in time to be ready for a call from John Ringling North II, wanting to buy Kelly Miller Circus, up for sale, and asking Jim to become a virtual partner. The two had been friends for twenty years.  Royal was then as best employed as he would ever be, Big Apple Circus giving him a year around salary and benefits. It gave him grave pause—give up all that?  But when the House of Ringling calls, who can say no?  

The following is largely drawn from Lane Talburt’s excellent  two-part piece in Bandwagon.  In the article,  Talburt writes that during Jim’s last two years with Kelly Miller,  “fissures were developing between the owner and his general manager.” Royal specified “disagreements about routing and front end of the show.” He left the show at the end of the 2015 tour. The two have not spoken since.  

The exquisitely agile Mongolian Twins

Naturally, this revelation caught my attention, without which, this post might not be. Not spoken in ten years?  Thus was I stirred to  email Jim, asking him if he could elaborate on the issues separating them.  He declined to comment, except to correct the record, that, in fact, he had spoken briefly with John on the KM lot in Hugo at the opening of the 2018 season, and that, moreover “Ours was never an acrimonious relationship.”

Okay, to the ever-touchy subject of attendance,  rarely raised in circus circles unless conducting a formal interview while a lie detector test is running. I can only speculate, based on photos of people in the seats over time, that at some point, business began taking a rather ominous dive. This may have had something to do with an arguably diminishing quality of the later shows. I have the DVDs for all them from 2011 forward,  thanks to John for sending me one each year, along with a bag of, what? Yes, Peterson Peanuts! A humorous reference to my complaining about peanut pitches being crassly inserted between acts, rather than confined to intermission.

Of the first three shows, I saw one in person, in Brewster, New Jersey,  and  was left reasonably impressed. So Let’s argue that 2012 was the best show they put out.  Here in my view are indisputable highlights, acts I would very much welcome seeing again.

RYAN HOLDER TIGERS - Masterfully accomplished and  presented in a steady stream of maneuvers. A rarity.

FRIDMAN TORALES    Rolla bolla -- riveting

PIRATES OF THE KELLYBEAN Involving several acts, this work was  John's most enchanting production. 

CAROLYN RICE DOGS --  Flat out sensational. Damn, I haven't been this swept away since the Sephenson's dogs!

JUGGLER RAUL OLIVERAS -- Clubs, hoops, balls and hats in dazzling perfection.

ARMANDO  LOYAL ELEPHANTS -- Delightfully charming ... and, dare I say, cute?

STEVE AND RYAN CLOWNING, For creativity and dedication. My eyes brightened whenever they appeared, wondering what might come next.  And they didn't drag in the audience for hula hoops and pin the donkey.

MUSIC The two piece band of Marshall Eckelman and Michael Haerber was a marvel of sound and  contrast, delivering one of the best big top scores I’ve  heard in many years.  Bravo!

FINALE --  We are in darkness, illuminated objects are flying all around, when suddenly the lights come up and there stands the entire cast!  Bow wow showmanship of the highest order.

Okay, back to reality. After John Moss and Steve and Ryan left, what you got was a weakening product slowly slipping away.  

As recalled by Jim, the show had a "disappointing" 2016 season, and 2017 was "even worse." He lays the blame on "the lack of a good front end operation."  North closed the show at the end  2017, and in 2018, granted James Judkins the right to use the tile. Judkins recruited  Royal to the campaign.  Jim was now spreading his skills between a scaled down version of Kelly Miller and his regular position with Culpepper and Merriweather  The two hung in there for two hard years.  Business for 2018,  in Jim's words, was OK, but 2019  "wasn't good.”

Looking back on his days with John II, Jim shared this: “He is a gentleman and a very kind person ... When he was on the show, he would be in the tent watching the show at nearly every performance, and I do mean watching it. (that's him in the hat, below). This was something that the artists on the show appreciate ... He invited ideas from others for possible use in future shows. He defiantly has the ‘Ringling touch.'”
 

“John and I worked to make sure that everyone with Kelly Miller felt that what they did for the show was valued."  Which brings to mind an Al Ringling quote on the subject,  which I am paraphrasing, to wit, that nothing can so dispirit  a circus performer as a lack of appreciation.  Al had heart.  I think John II would have loved talking about the nuts and bolts of circus performance art with his great uncle Al Ringling, for whom the show itself was his greatest passion.

Most things in life come to an end.  Johnny the Sequel loved the  elephants, and, without them. hadn’t the will to go on.

Cry, Jumbo, Cry.

The Festival Begins Today

And I wish I could be there. I can feel a kind of rare excitement.  Even if all of the judging may not always make sense, this is still the biggest circus event in the world.

       SEASONAL CHEERS TO PRINCESS STEPHANIE!!!

It's incomprehensible and tears come to my eyes

Whole neighborhoods in L.A. razed.  One after another house, gone.  Most painfully, family mementos and scrapbooks lost.

My heart goes out to them all.