The biggest circus story of 2023 was the return of The Greatest Show on Earth. It's a show with 150 years of history behind it. The name is known throughout the world, evoking huge tents with three rings in a golden age of entertainment. Even the names of the men behind it - the Ringling Brothers and PT Barnum - now immortalised on film as The Greatest Showman - are legendary.
But history can also be baggage, anchoring a name or concept in the past while the world changes and fashion moves on. By the 2010s, the Ringling show was on the wrong side of history. The elephant parade that was part of its brand belonged to a time when such things were uncontroversial. By 2016 they were the cause of protest, lawsuits and legislation that made them nonviable in the world of commercial entertainment.
Ringling ditched the elephants but also lost its audience and closed the following year, after 146 years on the road.
Could it come back, after a six year break, with a new all-human look and reclaim its throne as the Greatest Show on Earth?
For me, as a British observer, the show's challenge was filling arenas that seat 20,000 people. Not just filling all those seats, but filling a vast performance space more suited to sports events.
In Europe, we're accustomed to the intimacy of the big top. A circus tent that folds snugly around its spotlit ring is a magical place in its own right. Part of the appeal is the closeness of the action. In the front row, the trapeze artists swing over our heads. The clowns are close enough to squirt us with water. We can see the trembling of a straining muscle and the sweat on a performer's brow. Can a man balancing on a rola-rola be as involving when he's a distant stick figure?
I've watched the Ringling show several times on YouTube videos shot from various positions in the arena and it's clear that some seats feel a long way from the action. If you're at one end of the arena, a hoop jumping act at the far end is hard to even see, let alone feel the physicality in the way that you would if it was happening just feet from you.
At the same time, though, arena seating can offer a new perspective. In the highest seats - and the cheapest, perhaps? - you can sit above the high wire artists and look down on them, instead of looking up at them. You can sit at the level of the flying trapeze platforms and watch the flyers swoop down away from you into the well of the arena. It's a refreshingly different angle and might it even convey a greater sense of height than viewing such acts from the ground?
Ringling, in any case, was staging shows in three-ring tents this size 100 years ago, and moved into arenas in the 1950s, so they (or Feld Entertainment, to credit the current operators) know how to work the space.
At the start of the show, an impressive number of performers run out to fill the arena floor. 75 of them, although with all the colour and movement it looks like more. Lauren Irving belts out the stirring and catchy theme song, 'Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth' and a blaze of swirling lighting effects quickly whips a substantially full auditorium into a celebratory atmosphere.
The centrepiece of the arena is a raised ring-cum-stage. Shaped like an upturned bowl, it has sloping sides that form a ramp for access and continuously changes colour while displaying moving patterns across all its surfaces. It also has a moving track within its top, allowing some props and performers to revolve while others stand still, and a central disc that can be raised on hydraulic lifts to put the spotlight on a rola-rola or balancing act.
A British circus like Gandeys or Circus Extreme really needs to get one of these illuminated stages, which would look great within a big top, and perhaps even better than it does in an arena.
There are additional raised square stages at each end of the building, which give patrons in the end seats a close-up view of particular acts, such as a very strong skipping act, with several people standing on each others' shoulders while they jump the rope.
The area around the stages is laid out like a skate park that is used to great effect by a team of stunt cyclists, who swarm about, drawing our eye this way and that across the huge space, and turn impressive somersaults as they fly off the scattered ramps.
Comedy is provided by Equivokee, a trio from Ukraine. I'm not going to complain about the lack of red noses and clown make-up, although some traditionalists have. For me, slapstick is about more than make-up, as Laurel and Hardy proved a century ago. The funniest thing on UK TV at the moment is a children's programme called Danny and Mick which stars Danny Adams, Mick Potts and Clive Webb - the stars of Cirque du Hilarious. They dress as normal people while doing all the old clown routines like the wallpaper routine, and make them funnier than ever.
I can't say that Equivokee made much of an impression on me, but I think that was less their fault than the size of the arena. Clowning works best close up when you can see the facial expressions and the twinkle in an eye, and when the jesters are engaging directly with - or picking on! - the audience. At a distance, the humour evaporates within too much space.
Luckily, the Greatest Show on Earth fields plenty of 'big' acts that make good use of the space and height available.
A triangular high wire act by the Lopez Family is apparently a world first. It's such a simple and visually impressive concept that it's a wonder no one has thought of it before. Instead of performers crossing a single wire, there are performers simultaneously doing different things on three wires arranged in a triangle.
It's an act that would fit neatly above the ring of a big top, and which a UK circus should import, although it comes with additional challenges. According to Maria Lopez, the walkers have to cope with vibrations coming from the other wires.
Another big act that perfectly fits the space, and another update on an old theme, is a criss-crossing flying trapeze routine by the Flying Caceres. With two sets of performers crossing paths it literally adds another dimension - depth, towards us and away from us - to an act that usually only draws our eye from side to side.
The Nevas Troupe perform side-by-side on a Double Wheel of Destiny (a pair of what used to be called the Wheel of Death - because people have died performing it). They make impressive leaps atop the spinning contraptions and the release of fireworks adds to the thrills. One performer makes a daring leap between the two wheels and back again. That is the only moment, though, that two wheels is better than one. I found myself watching only one as it was difficult to watch two at the same time, and that made having two a little pointless. That one leap between them aside, I wonder if it would be better to separate the wheels and have one at each end of the arena, so that everyone would get a better view of at least one of them, rather than confining the pair to one end.
Speaking of world firsts, Wesley Williams rides the world's tallest unicycle as confirmed in the Guinness World of Records. The 34-foot-tall contraption, which is the equivalent of sitting astride a three-storey-tall ladder that isn't resting against anything (and is in fact balanced on a wheel!) puts his head right up among the lights in the roof.
It's true that he doesn't ride it very far, just back and forth across the width of the arena. Imagine if he could do a lap of honour around the whole building! He also wears a visible safety wire, but who can blame him?
But what about the absence of animals, which has offended some old school fans? Did I miss the parade of rubber mules that were Ringling's trademark? No, I didn't.
In the past, I have championed animals in the big top, and I enjoyed seeing what will probably be the last elephants and big cats to appear in a British circus. But that was a decade ago. The UK circus has almost entirely moved on from animals and, dare I whisper it among circus fans, it's better for it.
When I began reporting on the circus scene, the industry was up to its neck in the animal issue. There were pickets at the gates and negative press. Even the circuses without animals were compelled to talk about them. The image of the big top was so bad that many people hated circuses without ever seeing one. The ageing proprietors were embattled and embittered. It was no atmosphere in which to stage bright, happy family entertainment. The business was being sucked down like a man dying in quicksand.
Today, with the animals almost entirely gone, and no one even talking about them anymore, the circus feels like it has been reborn. The shows have a clean, modern aesthetic, with stages and floored seating replacing sawdust and mud. The negative image has evaporated, and audiences bring their kids without having to worry about ethics. The atmosphere in the shows and among a new generation of show-runners is invigorated and forward looking. The scene feels like it's thriving.
The new Ringling show feels like that, too, and maybe enough time has passed for it to find a new audience without alienating its old one.
And yet, Ringling hasn't copied Cirque du Soleil, the first big show to pioneer the idea of a circus without animals. The Greatest Show on Earth has not been produced in the style of 'new circus' - a format that once, and perhaps still does, sat apart from the big top kind, with both parties disliking each other in equal measure.
Ringling has not switched camps. There is no story line here, no theme, no message, no attempt to dress circus up as art. It is a traditional circus - perhaps we could say New Traditional - in the sense of providing colourful spectacle and uncomplicated family fun. It's only aim is to entertain, and it does so in abundance.
Although the acts aren't linked, they flow effortlessly from one to the next and the feel-good spirit will send you home singing "Welcome to the Greatest Show on earth!" Reader, I've been singing it all week!
The finale is 'human rocket' Skyler Miser. It's a simple act, but one guaranteed to put a smile on the face. As Skyler steps into her cannon, the whole arena chants the countdown: "Ten, nine, eight..." I even chanted it aloud at home: "Five, four, three..."
Boom! Like the immortal spirit of the circus, Skyler flies the length of the arena and lands on an inflatable crash pad.
Irving signs off with the company's slogan, which has become the salutation of circus worldwide: "May all your days be..." But wait! Instead of saying, "circus days," she says, "may all your days be Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey days!"
Has the image of circus become so tarnished in America that the Felds won't even utter the C-word? The word is conspicuously absent from the description of the show on their website.
This is a circus, however, and one that deserves to put the shine back on the word. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in 2023 it is currently the Greatest Circus on Earth.
