On May 21, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will perform for the very last time, ending a 146-year run. As of this writing, you can still buy tickets on the Internet for some of the final shows at various East Coast venues. The Ringling website also features a photo of a dazzlingly costumed female performer perched on the hooked trunk of an elephant—which is odd, because you won’t be seeing any elephants at any of those final shows. The pachyderms gave their last performance on May 1, 2016, retiring more than a year before the rest of the circus thanks to more than three decades of pickets, protests, videos, outraged letters, and lawsuits on the part of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA takes single-handed credit for shutting down Ringling Bros. for good—although dwindling ticket sales owing to entertainment competition are a more obvious cause.
When I saw the posters—elephant-less but crammed like vintage circus posters of yore with images of trapeze fliers, ringmasters, lions, and clowns—on a subway train in February, I was filled like a swimming pool with nostalgia. I’d been a 10-year-old fourth-grader the last time I’d seen a Ringling circus. So when my husband bought us tickets to see the circus at Washington’s downtown Verizon Center as a birthday present for me, and we rolled up in a taxi to a street jammed with parked trucks vividly decorated with circus adverts, I was thrilled.
During the early 1950s—I’m that old—the circus still performed outdoors in an enormous, glorious canvas tent—the big top—blazoned with pennons like the site of a medieval jousting tournament. My father had pulled my two younger sisters and me out of school for the afternoon, something almost unheard of in those conscientious days before weeklong family jaunts to Walt Disney World smack in the middle of a semester became the norm.
Under the big top, while we glued our lips together with tufts of cotton candy, a literal, not a metaphorical, three-ring circus unfolded: human pyramids of acrobats at one end, bareback horseriders at the other, while in the center ring a top-hatted, tail-coated ringmaster barkered a terrifying spectacle in which a bare-chested, whip-flicking wild-animal tamer persuaded lions and tigers to leap from one pillar to another. Trapeze artists swung overhead, and painted and bewigged clowns piled in and out of cars hightailing it along the periphery of all three rings.
There really was sawdust on the floor of the mammoth big top, and there really was a rancid fake-buttery smell of popcorn hanging in the tented air. The only thing we didn’t get to see that afternoon was the freak sideshow—discontinued by Ringling Bros. during the late 1960s—because my father didn’t think that tattooed midgets and bearded ladies were suitable entertainment for children.
My circus imagination had been formed by one of my favorite childhood movies, Cecil B. DeMille’s Best-Picture-winning The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), in which—besides an all-star cast that included James Stewart, Cornel Wilde, Betty Hutton, Dorothy Lamour, and a late-twenties Charlton Heston warming up for his starring part in that other DeMille classic, The Ten Commandments (1956)—the 1,400 performers of the Ringling Bros. 1951 circus played central roles. They weren’t simply background extras; they were the Greatest Show on Earth, without whose presence in supporting roles the plotlines acted out by the Hollywood star performers would have looked silly and meaningless.
All 1,400 of those troupers, or some approximation thereof, were still around for the Ringling circus I saw as a child a few years later, and the sheer hugeness of the cast was what made for the dizzying three-ring experience in which it was impossible to take in any one act in its entirety at any given moment. A Heisenberg principle of showmanship was at work, creating a near-magical effect of continuous, varying motion.
Because of the sheer size of the Ringling cast, and the logistical difficulties of moving all of its employees—plus hundreds of animals and more than 100 rail cars along the circus touring route, which then as now involved its own mile-long trains—the Ringling circus, a creature of the merger of smaller circuses, some of whose origins dated back to the 1870s, had been in a continuous state of financial difficulty since the Depression, which shrank its audience drastically. As early as 1956 it abandoned the big top to perform in fixed locations (typically sports arenas like the Verizon Center) where it could save money by not having to erect its own tent and build its own grandstands. There was a series of sales and resales, with the Mattel toy company briefly owning the circus during the 1970s. (It currently belongs to Feld Entertainment, based in Ellenton, Florida, near the circus’s longtime headquarters in Sarasota. There hasn’t been a Ringling family owner since 1967.)
Furthermore, the Ringling circus has been badly bruised by what I call the Cirque du Soleil effect. Cirque was started during the 1980s by Montreal street buskers, and it has to this day all the features that marked its mime origins: fey costumes, acts distinguished as much by their artiness as by their performers’ acrobatic skills, and a continuous story line to give each of its spectacles a unified “theme.” Cirque’s clowns were more redolent of classic Continental commedia dell’arte than of Ringling’s brash and broad-brushed—and thoroughly American—caricatures, such as the “Weary Willie” hobo created by Emmett Kelly (1898-1979), the most famous clown in Ringling’s history.
Cirque did away with the Ringling “rings,” and it also did away with animals, so there were never PETA problems. Pitched at upmarket urban types who consider themselves a notch more sophisticated than the Middle American rustics who constituted Ringling’s core audience throughout much of its history, Cirque, which now has a permanent presence in Las Vegas, has given Ringling a run for its money.
The Ringling circus I saw at the Verizon Center was a duly reduced affair, downsized to perhaps 500 performers and crew members in all, and featuring just a single ring plus some side entertainments. An obviously Cirque-inspired story line titled “Out of This World,” and involving spaceships, planets, and a wicked intergalactic queen, seemed hokey and superfluous. Cringeworthy jokes by ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson could seem funny only to the hordes of glowstick-waving children in the audience, and a clown act of basketball players on unicycles stretched out for what seemed like light years.
Still—I admit it—I was dazzled. That was because, at its core, Ringling had managed to preserve intact the virtuoso human spectacles that make a circus a circus: trapeze swingers, high-wire walkers, pyramids of acrobats atop pairs of horses galloping the ring at 25 miles an hour. Hand-walking contortionists displayed in silvery globes descended from the ceiling. Eight brilliantly clad motorcyclists zipped around the inside of a giant steel-mesh ball just inches away from each other. Big-cat tamer Alexander Lacey coaxed tricks out of at least a dozen lions and tigers, and a herd of performing dogs, donkeys, llamas, and pigs almost (although not quite) made up for the missing elephants.
And that’s what strikes me as saddest about the imminent demise of Ringling Bros.: These were superbly skilled athletes carrying on acrobatic traditions dating back thousands of years of human history. You can see their counterparts somersaulting along the backs of bulls on the frescoes at Knossos, and on one of the facades of the 12th-century Rouen Cathedral a stone-carved Salome dances on her hands for the head of John the Baptist. These dozens of talented performers will soon be out of work—and where will they go? Something more than the greatest show on earth may well be dying. ¨
Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
