The Ringling Bros. Circus ends an era in American show biz.
Uniondale, N.Y. — Send home the clowns.
After 146 years, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus rolled up the net. Sunday evening’s performance was its last.
My friend Neal K. Carter and I attended Friday night’s presentation of the Greatest Show on Earth. I went to say goodbye to a part of America’s heritage and compare the current show with the production I attended about eight or nine years ago and what I recall from my first such encounter as a little boy.
This was the first Ringling Bros. experience for Carter, a pentalingual Manhattan attorney, free-market activist, and performing cellist.
The crisply renovated Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum — now called NYCB Live — was the last stop for what Ringling Bros. CEO Kenneth J. Feld called a traveling “town without a Zip code.” On Friday, this legendary act showcased visual wonders, daring feats, and constant surprises.
The often-stunning highlights included a half-dozen giant, silky balls that dangled from the ceiling like Christmas-tree ornaments. The silken cloth suddenly fell away and revealed a contortionist inside each plastic globe. These incredibly flexible young women twisted themselves into knots while cracking the plastic containers like eggs. They then hung by their ankles from the two clear hemispheres, perhaps 30 feet from the ground. Naturally, they made it look easy.
Before long, seven motorcyclists zoomed inside a see-through sphere of cross-hatched steel bars. Within this structure, their paths swiftly crisscrossed, but never collided. The slightest miscalculation would have made this look like a pileup at the Superbowl of Motocross, but inside a space smaller than a one-car garage. The effect resembled electrons hurtling within a nucleus, rather than outside of it — the laws of chemistry be damned.
SLIDESHOW: Ringling Bros. Circus Farewell
Meanwhile, a pair of clowns chit-chatted and threw glow-in-the-dark rings back and forth while walking around 180 degrees upside-down and about 150 feet over the ice rink (on which much of the cast skated at high speed through parts of the evening). These clowns did this with neither a net nor any evident worry in the world.
Also high above, acrobats swayed back and forth, flipped in the air, and caught each other by their feet and wrists. Thankfully, a net was deployed, as these mid-air connections thrice failed. These artists nearly smacked into the rigging inside the Coliseum as they gained momentum on their high swings. Throughout Friday’s show, the line between triumph and disaster often seemed about a half-inch wide.
“I was impressed by the breadth of acts on display,” Carter told me. “Exotic animals, sure, but also trained dogs, pigs, llamas, even a donkey; basketball on unicycles, and the most amazing horse stunts I’ve seen in my life, and I’m from the Far West, where rodeos are the norm. So, I’m not easily impressed.”
Indeed, five horses raced around a ring while their riders dismounted them, bounced off the ground, and then popped back into their saddles. One equestrian turned sideways in her saddle, hugged the horse’s torso (horso?), and shimmied under it until her head hung upside-down a few inches above the floor. She then climbed back around the horse’s other side and returned to her saddle. This was done while her horse, and four others, circulated at full gallop. This could have gone south with the tiniest human or equine misstep. And yet it unfolded flawlessly, with neither man nor beast looking as if anything unusual were afoot. Or ahoof.
“The circus is a bit of Americana that is a shame to lose,” Carter added. “I understand that there are other entertainment options available today, but the end of the American circus is like the end of baseball — an institution whose annual arrival was eagerly anticipated.”
How true.
PETA and other animal-rights activists slammed Ringling Bros. over alleged mistreatment of elephants. Circus executives disputed these claims. In any case, the elephants were retired last May. This, ironically, made the circus less attractive for some. “What’s a circus without dancing elephants?” they wondered.
Over the years, audiences have enjoyed a profusion of other circus options — not least the splendid Cirque du Soleil, creators of the exquisite The Beatles LOVE extravaganza at Las Vegas’s Landmark Hotel. This competition hardly made life easier for the decades-old RBB&BC.
Finally, Ringling Bros. have intimated, too many of today’s children cannot sit still long enough to savor two hours of indoor excitement, plus a 15-minute intermission. Perhaps video games and endless smart-phone nonsense really have rotted their brains beyond repair.
Whatever the reasons, the three circuses independently launched and eventually merged by the five Ringling Brothers, James A. Bailey, and the legendary Phineas Taylor “P.T.” Barnum just went the way of black and white TV. The last, sold-out performance of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was live-streamed on Ringling.com, Facebook, and YouTube. It remains on those websites. Thus, an historical American institution took its high-tech, final bow.
— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online.