Acrobats and Acrobatics

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    Big Apple Circus Review: A City Tour, Pizza Rats Included

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    The third poodle wouldn’t join the conga line. Its fluffy co-stars pranced on their hind legs, while the third one scampered from side to side, reluctant to keep the rhythm. The poodle’s trainer coaxed and gently urged. But sometimes a dog just doesn’t want to dance.This was at the Big Apple Circus, the annual, genial extravaganza that sets up its big-top shop in a corner of the Lincoln Center Plaza. The opening performance was on the Saturday after Election Day, the tent lit in nonpartisan red and blue. The city still felt unsettled and even here the vibes were arguably off — acrobats stumbled, jugglers dropped batons, a unicycle rider lasted barely a second on the pedals.Vibes aside, a circus is still a circus. And a circus, however wobbly, is still a joy. There are buckets of popcorn to eat, light-up toys to wave, clowns to cheer. If this year’s acts are not exactly death defying, some of us have enough to worry about these days and may welcome the presence of a net, a mat. A soft place to land, spangles for days and nachos covered in Day-Glo orange cheese, that’s escapism enough.Rafael Abuhadba and one of his poodles at the circus. Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe circus’s theme this year is Hometown Playground. Whether the two-dozen or so performers and musicians actually call New York home is left unaddressed, but several of them are costumed as pizza rats (well, two pizza rats, one gamine pizza mouse), which is perhaps the next best thing.In a relatively brisk two hours, the show, which does without a ring master or mistress, visits a few tourist sites — Central Park, Coney Island, Harlem. Other acts are given vague tie-ins to the five boroughs. An acrobat performs an upside-down routine dressed as a construction worker. (Upside-down they don’t cat call.) He is followed by a trio on the Russian swing apparatus, also dressed as construction workers, which suggests certain imaginative limits. The poodles, all shelter rescues, arrive in a checkered cab. A couple of them are dressed as Ziegfeld girls.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Bob Yerkes, Bruised but Durable Hollywood Stuntman, Dies at 92

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      A body double to the stars, he performed sometimes bone-breaking feats in movies like “Return of the Jedi” and “Back to the Future.” And he was still at it in his 80s.Bob Yerkes, who was set on fire, thrown down stairs and hurled from skyscrapers, bridges and trains during a nearly 70-year career in Hollywood as a stunt double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson and other big-screen stars, died on Oct. 1 in Northridge, Calif. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Tree O’Toole, a stuntwoman who had been his caretaker. He had recently been ill with pneumonia.Though he was virtually unknown to audiences, Mr. Yerkes was a Tinseltown legend.In the 1980s alone, he flew through the air as Boba Fett in “Return of the Jedi,” hung from a clock tower as Christopher Lloyd’s character in “Back to the Future” and clung to scaffolding atop the Statue of Liberty in “Remo Williams.”“He is one of the few stuntmen I would say have celebrity status in the stunt business,” Jeff Wolfe, the president of the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures, said in an interview. “His lack of fear was kind of renowned.”Mr. Yerkes (rhymes with “circus”) performed stunts in the films “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Poltergeist” (1982), “Ghostbusters” (1984) and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), as well as on television in “Gilligan’s Island,” “Wonder Woman,” “Starsky and Hutch” and “Dukes of Hazzard.”He was concussed more times than he could remember.“I’m better now, though,” he said in a 2016 video produced by My Gathering Place International, a religious organization. “It used to be that when I’d talk, I wouldn’t finish a sentence.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Theater Review: In ‘White Gold,’ Rice Is a Sacred Starch

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      The family-friendly circus troupe Phare highlights the richness of Cambodian culture with gravity-defying acrobatics, Indigenous music and rousing choreography.In Cambodia, nothing is harvested more often or eaten more frequently than rice. It’s a wonder then that such familiarity does not breed contempt — quite the opposite. For Cambodian people, the grain is worth its weight in gold.The family-friendly circus act “White Gold,” presented by the Cambodian Circus ensemble Phare and playing now at Stage 42 while the New Victory Theater undergoes renovations, details the nation’s inextricable link to the sanctified crop. Throughout the show, we watch a young man contend with rice as if it really is a rare metal, one that first brings great prosperity but soon incites competition and greed.“White Gold” evokes traditional Cambodian art and ancient religion from its opening act. A man draws an eight-point mandala — an intricate, geometric design used in spiritual practice — to the vibrating hum of a Khmer chant. The acts that follow continue to highlight the richness of Cambodian culture with acrobatics, Indigenous music (played by three onstage musicians) and rousing choreography (by Julien Clement), all without spoken dialogue. The story, conveyed entirely through movement and live painting, is based loosely on “Siddhartha,” the 1922 novel by Herman Hesse about a young man who renounces material possessions and embarks on a humble journey of self-discovery. In “White Gold,” our traveler abandons the bounty of his family home and winds up in a community plagued by avarice.There, he learns that traditional Buddhist values like kindness and patience clash with consumerism and the hunger to hoard more rice. As the stakes for the young man intensify, so do the ensemble’s stunts. The masterly Phare troupes acrobatic feats (tumbling, juggling, launching one another off a teeterboard) defy what most of us expect of gravity. Despite the story’s weighty roots, Bonthoeijn Houn, the artistic coach, embeds each act with moments of lighthearted theatricality; actors bulge their eyes and wag their butts, eliciting endless giggles from the audience of children and adults, both equally entertained.Even more exciting is witnessing the care that Phare members take in assuring one another’s safety, as the acrobats spot fellow performers like cheerleaders and clap to signify they’re ready to soar. Theater often prides itself on keeping labor unseen; this circus doesn’t mind showing it. During a Rola Bola act, Tida Kong stacks four cylinders in a perpendicular pattern and then hops on top. Later, during a hand balancing act, he tilts his body to alarming angles while several feet in the air. All of this happens while rice engulfs every inch of the New Victory stage, sometimes flowing like a waterfall from an overhanging tarp, other times splashing like ocean waves when characters throw it in the air. How any of Phare’s players withstand the gritty feel of it on bare or thinly covered feet remains a mystery. But if they’re in any pain, it’s not visible — only the mesmerizing beauty is. And unlike at the Big Top, an orchestra ticket seats you mere feet away.White GoldThrough Dec. 30 at Stage 42 presented by the New Victory Theater, Manhattan; newvictory.org. Running time: 1 hour.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      in Theater

      Next Up at the Home of ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’? A Circus, of Course.

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      The San Francisco theater where the musical revue ran for decades will get a new show in the fall by the 7 Fingers, a Montreal circus collective.Gypsy Snider was just 4 when she began performing alongside the red-nosed clowns and unflappable jugglers of the Pickle Family Circus, a San Francisco troupe that her parents helped found. She went on to join the Cirque du Soleil before becoming a co-founder of the 7 Fingers, a Montreal circus collective, and creating dazzling acrobatic and trapeze numbers for the Tony-award-winning 2013 revival of “Pippin” on Broadway.Now, Snider, 51, is returning to San Francisco as one of the artistic directors of a new 7 Fingers circus production celebrating the city’s colorful history that will open in the fall at Club Fugazi, the venerable North Beach theater that was home to the long-running musical revue “Beach Blanket Babylon.”While the show has not yet been named, it is described as a love letter to San Francisco and will include scenes about the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and the Summer of Love.The production, which was announced Wednesday by one of the show’s producers, David Dower, will also be a homecoming for its other artistic director, Shana Carroll, a Berkeley native who started her career as a trapeze artist with the Pickle Family Circus. Like Snider, Carroll helped found the 7 Fingers (or “Les 7 Doigts de la Main,” in French), a pathbreaking troupe that started in 2002.From her childhood, Snider said, she was enchanted by the concept of contemporary circus that began to take hold in the 1970s, a human spectacle driven by emotion, artistry and narrative instead of the elephants and tigers of the Ringling Brothers.“I wanted to create a circus I had never seen before,” Snider said. “I was more interested in what you could do to elevate circus through storytelling.”Now she and Carroll are returning home to the Bay Area, with a circus that they hope will bring new life to Club Fugazi, where “Beach Blanket Babylon,” a zany spoof, ended its remarkable 45-year run in 2019. “The idea was that we were going to be more connected to the community that raised us,” Snider said.The pandemic delayed their plans by more than a year, but now that the performing arts are making a comeback across the country, the project has the green light: The trapeze is being installed, and tickets will soon go on sale.The century-old Club Fugazi building is much smaller than the spacious arenas that many circus audiences are used to, but to Snider, that is very much the point. Getting closer to the action makes it a visceral, intimate experience, she says.The theater will remove balcony seating that “Beach Blanket Babylon” had added and rebuild the stage so it protrudes into the audience, cabaret style. The idea is that after many people spent months confined to their couches, passively watching television and movies, this show will make audience members feel as though the circus performers might just end up on their laps (which they won’t, assuming all goes well).The cast and production team, who have all been vaccinated, plan to start their initial workshops for the show in the next couple of weeks. It is unclear how many audience members the city will allow inside the theater come fall, but no matter the capacity level, the creative team hopes that the show will propel San Francisco back into vibrancy after an extended live performance drought.“Circus is so death defying that it’s life affirming,” Snider said. “That’s what we want cabaret to do in San Francisco in a post-pandemic society.” More