TAMPA, Florida (AP) — Three weeks before opening night, director Amy Tinkham is at center ring working intently with a woman who will be lifted by her hair and twirl overhead seconds before motorcycles zip underneath her.
That’s supposed to happen just as an acrobat launches himself from an oversized swing high into a waiting net.
The hair woman — 34-year-old Andrea Raffo, the wife of the tiger tamer — has to be hoisted by a rope attached to her flowing locks at just the right instant so she doesn’t get splattered by the speeding motorcycles.
Right after that come the elephants, galloping horses, guys on stilts, dancers, goats riding on little ponies, clowns and the rest of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus.
This carefully choreographed chaos, accompanied by uproarious music, is crammed into the opening minutes of the venerable Greatest Show on Earth, the 138th incarnation of which will be playing to around 5 million people in 84 U.S. cities during the next two years.
But before customers get to see the new two-hour extravaganza, it has to be organized, developed, massaged, manipulated and perfected during six weeks of intense rehearsals inside a cavernous exhibition hall at the state fairgrounds in Tampa, an hour north of the circus’s winter home in Palmetto, Florida.
Starting the day after Thanksgiving, an international assortment of clowns, aerialists, contortionists, jugglers, dancers, musicians, daredevils and animal handlers came together for 40 days under the tutelage of Tinkham, 44, a sought-after choreographer and director who has worked with Madonna, Britney Spears and Aerosmith, to name just a few.
This, however, is her first time working with animals and a bunch of performers who don’t speak English, not to mention the real risk of getting somebody seriously hurt if the timing isn’t exactly right.
It’s really crazy fun, she insists.
To get ready for Tampa, Tinkham says she watched videos of the performers and used toys to rough out the show on her dining room table last summer. Her children — ages 9, 4 and 18 months — were an eager focus group.
I had to have a huge education on the circus, and this circus, and what the traditions are, she says. And I think it became for me truly paying attention to my kids — what really is thrilling and what really is beautiful and what really is funny.
The show’s direction was refined further in August during the white model meetings, another circus tradition. That’s when planners gather around an all-white, 1-inch scale model of the performers and 80-by-120-foot ring to figure out how everything will work in the space.
In a move that made headlines two years ago, the Ringling Bros. circus went from its traditional three rings to one big one, so kids could better focus on the action.
Life on the rails
Earlier in the day, production manager Georgia Stephenson gathers most of the show’s 108 performers in the plastic bleacher seats for morning announcements that are translated on the spot into Chinese and then Portuguese by other circus personnel. They are a virtual United Nations, hailing from 15 nations. Acrobats from China, motorcycle daredevils from Paraguay, dancers from Brazil.
Good morning, Greatest Show on Earth! Stephenson says.
Among the cast is a slim, unassuming bald man from Brooklyn, New York, intently sewing a patchwork vest made entirely of silk neckties. His name is Tom Dougherty and he’s apparently in his 40s, although he refuses to say for sure. When he puts on the vest, makeup and obligatory red nose, he becomes simply Tom, the clown around whom the whole show revolves.
Dougherty, who studied theater in New York in the ’70s, has been clowning for Ringling Bros. for 28 years, but this is his first time as the star or — in circus lingo — the clown eccentric. During the show, he struggles with the ringmaster, a baritone-voiced veteran stage actor named Chuck Wagner, for the ringmaster’s hat and control of the show. Hilarity ensues, of course.
Dougherty lives in a travel trailer that goes where the circus goes. Most of the 275 performers and crew live aboard the circus train, a mile-long self-contained city on rails that looks generally the way it did when Cecil B. DeMille chronicled the circus life in the 1952 film The Greatest Show on Earth.
Another full Ringling Bros. company just started the second year of its two-year tour by train, and a third, smaller unit travels by truck to smaller towns that the trains can’t reach.
Performers in Dougherty’s unit will cover around 32,000 miles together over the next two years, living in specially retrofitted cars bought from Amtrak. This group has 18 children traveling along with their performing parents.
I find it’s a very healthy place to live, Dougherty says. You feel like you’re in a very nice small town where your front yard changes every week.
At most stops along the way, crowds still turn out for the traditional walk of the elephants from the rail yard to the arena. In New York City every March, the pachyderms stop traffic as they parade at midnight from Queens to Madison Square Garden. Animal rights protesters sometimes show up, too.
Dougherty thinks America needs the circus more than ever.
I think in this day and age where we have so much technology and we’re always relating to screens, it’s nice to come to someplace where you’re relating to human beings again, he says. We’ve lost that contact.
The business of fun
Nicole Feld is a petite, fast-talking 29-year-old who can’t seem to sit still. She’s co-producer of the circus with her father, Kenneth, chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment. His father, promoter Irvin Feld, bought the circus from John Ringling North in 1967, a decade after the show moved from under the iconic big top canvas tent into arenas. Nicole has spent nearly every December of her life around circus rehearsals.
She says she’s been around long enough to know that every circus, to satisfy its young, discerning audience, must include three nonnegotiable elements: animals, a trapeze performance and, of course, clowns. Attempts to deviate from that basic format have fallen flat over the years.
And because of shrinking juvenile attention spans these days, acts have been pared down to 6 or 7 minutes — about the time between commercial breaks on kids’ TV shows. Years ago, acts would go on for as long as 10 minutes.
A big part of the Felds’ job is traveling the world to find fresh talent for each new circus, stuff that American audiences have never seen. That might involve visiting a circus festival in Budapest, a trip to China to scout acrobats and contortionists, or a quick jaunt to South America to check out a high-wire act.
Every year, too, the Felds are inundated with e-mailed video and Web site links from acts that want to be part of the circus.
If we think something looks great on the video, we will hop on a plane and we will go to where those people are and we will see it live, Nicole Feld says. Because sometimes it’s not the same, sometimes it’s better. And you also have to make sure it’s something they can do on a consistent basis, and they have the personality, the excitement and passion for performing.
This year, everyone is buzzing about a troupe of seven Ukrainian acrobats who bounce around on oversized rubber inner tubes, turning flips and tumbling to and from each other’s shoulders. It’s fast, colorful and amazing.
Getting the young performers and their reluctant parents to agree to have the circus whisk them far away from home was no easy feat. One of the troupe’s leaders, 21-year-old Sergii Temkaiev, says they knew very little about life in America but realized that getting into the cast of the Ringling Bros. circus was joining the big leagues.
Tim Holst, a Feld Entertainment executive who’s been scouting talent for more than two decades, says it’s gotten harder to find unique performers who are willing to sign on for as many as a dozen shows a week for two grueling years. Used to be, circus schools in the former Soviet bloc countries produced performers that would jump at the chance.
Circus officials declined to say what performers are paid.
As the world changes and there are other opportunities for young people, you’ve got to find that right person who has the vision of seeing their work in the circus atmosphere, says Holst, 60, who started with Ringling Bros. 36 years ago as a clown. I think people want an easier lifestyle now. Maybe they don’t want to work as hard.
It all comes together
Three weeks later, on opening night in a Tampa, Florida, hockey arena, Tinkham watches from the stands like a proud mama, as Raffo is lifted by her hair at just the right moment, the motorcycles roar past and all the performers stay out of each other’s way during the opening number that is way more colorful, sparkly and bombastic than in rehearsals.
It was overwhelming, she says.
Now back at home in Los Angeles, Tinkham has a couple of more traditional music projects in the works, but she says she’d join the circus again in a minute. That can’t happen too soon for her kids. Her 9-year-old son talked about it so much at school that his teacher had to tell him to stop.
The other kids were getting sad that their mommies didn’t get to make a circus over Christmas, she says.
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