Happy Old Year! ... Highlights and Lowlights of the Season Past

Tomoko Nakagawa, 1955

Let's give a toast -- and roast a little, too -- to the season about to hit the history books. These informal impressions are drawn from my visits to most of the big tops and to Ringling. They are NOT based upon a careful evaluation of all I've seen.

Randomly speaking ...

Best News: Big Apple Circus is in fine hands, those of new artistic director Guillaume Dufresnoy. He has displayed both a penchant for novelty (porcupine and pig!) and a subtle flair for top-drawer staging. Will this alone turn the corner? Not exactly, but I think BAC has too much going for it to hit the skids. [comments that follow pertain to Dance On!]

Worst News: Continued media-rattling allegations of elephant abuse at Ringling: Mother Jones magazine doing a story on the issue; the show reaching a $270,000 settlement with the USDA, without admitting guilt. Jay Leno making hay of the issue on the Tonight Show. These unwelcome developments, combined with a bill being passed through congress that would curtail performing animals in circuses -- and the mere idea of the Ringling staff being taught how to handle and care for its own animals by USDA outsiders -- may mark the most embarrassing PR setback ever for "The Greatest Show on Earth." Not to mention the negative impact it will have upon public perceptions in general of all circuses. Who is ultimately responsible? Kenneth Feld.

Welcome Return: The aerial ballet, in new diverse forms, as witness wonderful incarnations of it on Cole Bros. Circus of Stars and Ringlings' Fully Charged.

Best act combing acrobatics and comedy: The African tumblers on Circus Vargas. A sly riot.

Most innovative act: The Wuqiao Acrobatic Troupe on Uni-wheels at Big Apple Circus

Best old thrill turn cleverly recycled. The human fuse on Ringling's Fully Charged.

Best ringmaster (kindly keep in mind, I do not see all shows) Kelly Miller's John Moss III.

Worst ringmaster. Shall we count the blowhards? How about Cole, Ringling (Iverson), Vargas, and Carson & Barnes.

Best band: Big Apple Circus

Best taped score: Cole Bros. Circus of Stars

Worst performance setting (no rings,no respect): a tie between Ringling and Cole Bros. Circus of Stars

Best spectacle: The second half segments of Ringling's Fully Charged

Most Offensive spectacle: Unused ring curbs stacked in clusters on Ringling Fully Charged set. Rub your indifference in our eyes, Feld Family!

Warmest atmosphere: Kelly Miller Circus

Best little house act bordering on the amateur: The modestly delightful dogs on Carson & Barnes.

Most impressive contortion display: the solo contortionist on Carson & Barnes.

Most hair-raising thriller: As I recall, on Circus Vargas, the separation between the two halves of the Globe of Death when the thing split open was incredibly wide, giving me a chill I rarely get at circuses these safer days.

Most vexingly uneven show: Carson& Barnes, from world class to world crass.

Most remarkably scored big cage act: Cole Bros. Circus of Stars

Worst prop department: Cole Bros. klutzy forklift operations.

Biggest downer of the year: the thoroughly mean-spirited new film Water for Elephants.

Worst show-disrupting spiel: A tie between Kelly Miller's Peterson Peanut plea and Ted McCray's prolonged snake photo grind on Circus Vargas, bloating the intermission for as long as it takes.

Best performance setting: Big Apple Circus

Biggest disappointment: Cirque du Soleil's Totem. Is the world running out of talent enough to stock the CDS franchise? A thousand dry ice machines, a thousand flashing laser beams will not completely disguise threadbare goods.

Most welcome sight: A full house at Circus Vargas in Hollywood. Me wonders if the terrific CV product placement in Water for Elephants caused a minor stamped onto the lot at Sunset Boulevard -- boffo location!

The last word: To Baraboo's perennial booster, the good Doc Bob Dewel, who, like too many "visitors" to this blog, never deposits a single comment here but charms his way in through my e-mail. Bob's latest report on restoration work underway at his beloved Al Ringling Theatre: "Apparently we are never destined to have a sugar daddy with a million bucks or so, but are slowly restoring on our own, with a qualified artist. Outer lobby gleams, inner lobby is nearly done---we spent $1000 just to verify for certain the original colors (Peach and Gold, light and bright). ... All eleven dressings rooms restored, Ladies lounge partially finished ...Rapp and Rapp would be proud. So would Al. Ringling. Incidentally Al’s magnificent mansion is for sale! "

The last photos: Let's bring on Lory Lagoyda, whose mom and dad worked on Ringling 1955-56. Her mother, Tomoko Nakagawa, came over when she was just 18 with the Uyeno Troupe -- eight young ladies --from Japan, imported by John Ringling North to lend additional beauty and charm to production numbers. Lory's dad worked with the elephants. Here are some pics of Tomoko, and how happy she looks to be in the great Ringling chorus!

Tomoko Nakagawa in the Mexicanorama aerial ballet, 1956

One of the Mama's in the Park, 1955

Say it With Flowers, 1956 spec

And that's a Happy Old Year!

Sneak Peak Inside the Changing Circus: Feld Legal Takes on Circus Claiming Not "Greatest" but "Happiest" title

Can You Be Happy Without Being Great?

Back in the year 1969, when America's sights were set on a moon landing, one U.S. circus for a spell claimed an imminent tour of the entire universe. Greatness was not its mantra; Happiness was. It declared itself "The Happiest Show on Any Earth."

Soon after, from the Greatest Show on Earth (aka Ringling-Barnum) came an icy letter to the owner of the Happiest Show on Any Earth, in essence claiming trademark infringement on its world famous slogan, and demanding the immediate removal of all such references in the happier circus's advertising materials.

The recipient of the Ringling directive, himself a hothead noted for bluster, quickly retreated from his far-flung allusions to spreading joy far beyond planet Earth alone.**

The show?


** Hint: Worlds reachable by telephone.

The journey is universal, from the dawn of Circus
to a thousand years from now in a distant galaxy.
The details are local.
The details are you.

Water for Circus Vargas, the Second Screening Around: Give Me Fake Good and Thrilling Circus Over Fake Big Top Disaster Flick

Circus Owner from hell: Christoph Waltz as August powers Water for Elephants.

I wanted to like the film better than when I first saw it in a theater, where I could not hit a pause button and replay to be sure. Since I could in my living room, I'm glad to know that August did not tell his men to red-light vet student Jacob off the train, but "kick him off" at the next station.

Not that I now see August as a nice guy. I see in him the terrific actor (from Inglorious Basterds -- I must check out that flick) who gives Water its most and only intense spine: cruelty to animals and to people.

In fact, the movie is almost relentlessly pessimistic and cruel, forever on the verge of the next August eruption. And when he finally feels the breeze of his wife's sweet eyes for Jacob, all hell breaks lose, and, to that end, the film takes fire.

OK, so The Greatest Show on Earth plotted impossible things too, but by showing Heston throw off the crooked gamers, it was true to history. So why in the world would a circus owner as brutal and barbaric as August NOT have cons working the lot? His envy of the Ringling Brothers and their ethics goads him on, in like manner, to rid the show of the slippery fingered mob. Totally out of character for this king thug. I would love to have seen a real old Hey, Rube! all over the lot in reaction to a towner getting conned.

Most ugly scene of all: Side show men with iron stakes bonking the heads of young kids trying to sidewall in.

Instead of all the historically viable options, this dreary exploitation gives us something that, to my fragile knowledge, has never occurred in recorded circus history: Circus workers themselves throwing open cage wagon doors in the animal tent to let loose the wild ones, a movie aimed at in retaliation, I take it, for August's cruelty to everyone including his own wife.

So, we go from message movie -- sadistic circus owner who, quoting one of his underlings, "shouldn't have the right to be around animals" -- to Hollywood disaster flick when the menagerie is liberated, throwing a tsunami of jungleland vengeance all over the lot.

Circus? Almost nothing. Just snatches of acts. One ring on a railroad show in the 1930s -- are you kidding? Not a single elephant until Rosie arrives ... Are you kidding me again? Topping them all is the idea that Rosie alone(who does things we usually expect to see only in Disney cartons) is going to save the show and give it the pach power to rival Ringling?

Paaaaaaleeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!

What moved me the most this time, a real surprise, was the final scene, back inside the Circus Vargas ticket wagon, with Hal Halbrook as the older Jacob looking back on his years with Marlena and Rosie, both now gone, and wanting to join up, and not "run away with the circus" but "come home."

Boy, how much $ did Vargas have to pay for that prime product placement in the first scene as the camera panned its glorious posters. No wonder last summer in Hollywood, the Vargas show I took in was nearly packed. I've never seen anything close to that in recent one-ring Vargas years.

Some other bits: I did not know elephants could be taught to execute so many movements merely to voice commands. And I still don't believe it. Best of all, and totally fake in my skeptical view, Rosie whacking August with a tent stake is a howler. Although, I loved the scene.

The movie has a terribly superfluous beginning on the Vargas lot, addressing elder abuse and allowing the older Jacob (Hal Halbrook) to set his story in flashback. But all that exposition could have been handled more effectively later into the story when Jacob levels with August about not having finished college; movie should have opened in the dark of night with the lone figure of a young distraught Jacob walking the tracks in limbo, a circus train in the distance coming into view.

Most exciting scene for me was the unloading along the flats, the wagons coming down the runs! Loved the banner lines waving in the breeze, they looked real. (Circus World Museum sure got shorted in the credits, a tiny line at the very end) Why could they not have given us a real rough sounding circus band of the era, I wondered, rather than something approaching Karl King symphonic? Another quibble: The first images of circus acts, in slow misty motion, look more like Cirque du Soleil prepping under a revival tent to bring class to the masses. Excuse me, where did the Great Depression go?

I've not read the book; don't know if I want to. If the movie is true to the book, I'd guess that the book is not well researched, to put it politely.

Water for Elephants is so grim and vicious, so dark and bleak and hopeless, I have no desire to ever see this thing again. And, no "special features" on the DVD; was the cast and crew left just as bewildered and disillusioned as am I?

Here is my greatest circus cinema wish: A movie about John Ringling in the roaring twenties, and then losing power; subplot, the rivalry between Leitzel and the end ring aerialist leading to the latter pushing herself into an affair with Codona. It really happened, kids. There is so much out there under tents of power, magic, intrigue, shame, charisma and corruption to adapt!

End scene: John Ringling a few years later, out of big top power, passed by, sitting in a wheel chair watching a Coles Bros. Circusparade passing him by, tears down his reminiscent eyes.

12.13.11

Two Circuses in San Francisco ...

Perrier included


Potable water, maybe

Those Were A Few of My Favorite Things ... One Magical Christmas Many Seasons Ago ...

When I first heard the song from the original cast album of the Broadway hit, The Sound of Music, I was utterly entranced by its mystical relevance to the Christmas season -- which was, appropriately, then upon us.. It's, I suppose, the rich imagery of Oscar Hammerstein's lyric-- among the gems, "snow flakes that stay on my nose and eye lashes" -- that set the song so hauntingly apart from all others. Only the Great Oscar could craft such magic.

How poignant the stretch of time that has passed, remembering the moment in my bedroom first hearing the song played on a Sunday evening radio show that featured newly released cast albums, and then, a week or so later, playing it on my "magnificent Magnavox" hi fidelity record player. As enchanting then as it remains now.

It became a legendary jazz classic. Lately, it's found its way into the Holiday cannon. Just heard Andy Williams on a Comcast music channel singing it. Wonderful rendition.

It has been sung by millions. One of life's deepest satisfactions is to observe younger generations embracing elements of popular culture that I was there to embrace when they were first introduced.

Pretty Pictures for the Holidays ...

Courier & Ives by Monet: From Baraboo with Charm: "Happy Holiday from Al Ringling Theatre Friends"




Out to best Cirque du Soleil? Out to trump The Once Greatest Show on Earth? That tent, under which the horse and acrobatic show, Cavalia, is holding court in Atlanta, is claimed to be the "the world's largest touring big top," its height a staggering 125 feet. Its spread -- 100,000 sq. feet. Came in from Montreal on 115 semi-trucks and a work load of 300 people. Took 'em a month to load up out of Montreal (founded by Cirque spin offs, of which there seem to be thousands), move to Atlanta, and spread their gargantuan canvas. Why not a red and silver train, please, Santa -- in three sections? Please, oh please!

Who on earth is funding this monster? Are they hoping to go broke? Show uncorked on December 7, and unless it gets extended, reports What Now Atlanta (yes, indeed), the big top will vanish from Atlanta's midtown skyline after the last show on January 8.

Cavlia is offering a new show titled Odysseo. I saw an earlier edition, ponderously impressive, several years ago and predicted it had no future. How stupidly I predicted. Or maybe it has funding from Canada, something like that. The audacious magnitude of its physical layout trumps (I did not think such a thing was possible until now) the ill-fated Gene Kelly directed Clownaround, whose set was probably heavier and more complicated than the building itself, the Oakland Coliseum Arena, in which it premiered. After moving to San Francisco's Cow Palace, it went from Clownaround to Clownaground. (Well, I did mange to get Mr. Kelly's autograph.)



Let the sunshine back in, Florida! In land of Great Fallen Irvin Feld Dreams, a much smaller dream is taking shape in Disney World's revamped Fantasyland. This new parcel to be called Storybook Circus neighborhood. They're really, it seems, recycling the Dumbo ride and a few other existing attractions, plus adding, in Disneyspeak, "select experiences."

I'd rather go back to soft dreamy Baraboo ...

My New Book is Half Unloaded on the Amazon Lot

A publication date of December 31 (I saw it on Amazon) for my newly birthed book, Inside the Changing Circus, felt magical. For a few days, I could see treating it as "Santa's sleigh on standby alert for overnight rush deliveries of new book to roll off presses on Christmas eve!" How romantic. How short-lived.

In the publishing world, a date is only a time frame.

So my book showed up on Amazon's lot a few days ago, looking half unloaded. Still is. No image of the cover. It will arrive in a day or ten. And the brief description bears an error for which I plead guilty. I was the one who penned it for a back cover blurb. It reads "from Cirque du Soleil to the bottom feeder big tops," and I've since revised it to "from the Kings of the sawdust rings to the bottom feeder big tops." But it didn't make it to Amazon.

I fear the phrase could easily be construed as placing Cirque high above all the other circuses, the others being bottom feeders. Not my intent. But it does sound elitist.

BearManor Media has dispatched a sign painter out to to the Amazon lot to revise my hasty choice of words . It will read either "Big Apple Circus and Cirque du Soleil" or "the Kings of the sawdust rings." I gave my publisher the option.

Still sorry they could not have raised the curtain on Christmas eve. In the book world once, boxes of new books straggled into book stores days before and after official "publication" dates. Nowadays, they have a way of sneaking into Amazon land before anybody else can see them.

So, I will be far from the first person to see my own published book.

But this can't compare (I trust, UPS ...) to the plight of my first book, Behind the Big Top. It was out floating around for months before I finally received, after intense communication with the publisher, my first copy.