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    ‘Water for Elephants’ Brings the Circus to Broadway

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    At the sound of a gunshot, a performer, wreathed in white silks, tumbles from the ceiling. His body somersaults, over and over, faster and faster, until it hangs suspended, just above the stage floor. This scene, in the first act of “Water for Elephants,” a new musical that begins previews Feb. 24 at the Imperial Theater, portrays the death of an injured horse. And it captures the singular methods of the show — a synthesis of theater and circus, bedazzled for a Broadway audience.“In musicals, you talk until you have to sing and you sing until you have to dance,” Jessica Stone, the director of “Water for Elephants,” explained. “And in our case, you dance until you have to leap into the air.”With a book by Rick Elice, and music and lyrics by PigPen Theater Co., the musical is based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel, which also inspired a 2011 film. Set in the 1930s and in the very early 2000s, it centers on the memories of Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin, playing the younger version, and Gregg Edelman as the elder), a veterinarian who recalls the long-ago days when he hopped a train and fell in with the members of the Benzini Brothers circus, a ragtag outfit that crisscrossed the country delivering low-rent, high-excitement marvels.“You wanna feel something/You know is real, something/beyond the paler things,” the chorus sings in the opening number, describing the promise of the big top.Antoine Boissereau’s aerial silk performance in which he portrays the death of a horse during the song “Easy.”That promise is kept by the ensemble’s seven dedicated circus performers, as well as two swings, many of them veterans of the 7 Fingers circus company. Shana Carroll, a founding director of that company, was tasked with circus design. (With Jesse Robb, she is also the show’s co-choreographer.) In their initial meetings before the show’s premiere last summer in Atlanta, Carroll and Stone agreed that the circus stunts should never appear without cause. They had to tell the story (as in a scene set during a Benzini show) or enhance moments of high emotion (as in the case of the horse).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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      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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      Theater to See in N.Y.C. This Holiday Season

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      Christmas classics, comedic musicals and a star-studded Sondheim revival: a guide to the shows to see this season.The holiday season is upon us, which means it’s an excellent time for theatergoers to pack into cozy venues for a feast of the eyes. Our critics have selected a handful of options for tourists and locals looking to catch up on Broadway and Off Broadway shows this holiday season. And we’ve included some other choices as well.For those who prefer to be entertained from home, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year will feature performances by Broadway shows like “& Juliet,” “Back to the Future: The Musical,” “How to Dance in Ohio,” “Shucked” and “Spamalot,” along with an appearance by Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells of “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Other theater-related streaming options include “Dicks: The Musical,” with Nathan Lane, and the 2015 documentary that the “How to Dance in Ohio” musical is based on.Here is a selection of notable shows onstage in New York City.Fun for the Whole FamilyBig Apple CircusStraw hats thrown like Frisbees. Death-defying aerial acts. Dizzying foot juggling routines. All accompany the contortionist, trapeze and tightrope circus classics that spectators young and old have come to ooh and aah at. This year, Big Apple presents “Journey to the Rainbow,” a collaboration with the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, complete with humans dressed as polar bears and cotton candy galore. Through Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan. Read the review.Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City RockettesIt’s a New York City classic. It’s a Christmas classic. The Rockettes are back with sensational high kicks set to state-of-the-art lighting and projections. Little ones will be dazzled by animated trains, ribbons and wintry displays. Their adult companions will delight in a Nativity procession and holiday maximalism. Through Jan. 1 at Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan. Read the review.A Christmas CarolSet in a home built in 1862, in an intimate parlor room, this telling of the timeless Christmas tale stars John Kevin Jones as Charles Dickens. Audience members, surrounded by 19th-century holiday décor and candlelight, will travel back more than a century, to when Dickens wrote the story. The production also features a streaming version. Through Dec. 24 at the Merchant House, Manhattan.Craving Song and DanceSweeney ToddJosh Groban stars on Broadway as everyone’s favorite tall, dark and handsome throat slitter. Opposite the demon barber is a superbly zany Annaleigh Ashford as the murder-accomplice-baker Mrs. Lovett (our critic called her “a brilliant comic for whom comedy is not the end but the means”). The two stars will leave the production after the Jan. 14 performance, so be sure to catch them in full bloody glory before they go. Come for the meat pies and Stephen Sondheim’s gigantic score, stay for the shadowy lighting, which won Natasha Katz her eighth Tony Award. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Merrily We Roll AlongJonathan Groff stars alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez in this acclaimed revival of the former Sondheim flop, directed by Maria Friedman. Our critic called the show, which sweetly and gravely warns of the dangers of great ambition, “a palpable hit,” with “a thrillingly fierce central performance” by Groff and “high-wattage, laser-focused performances” by Radcliffe and Mendez. Through March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Jonathan Groff, obscured, Daniel Radcliffe, aloft, and Katie Rose Clarke in the musical “Merrily We Roll Along” at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere We AreUnderfed and yet very full: Will the people who have it all ever find something to eat? Inspired by two Luis Buñuel films, David Ives’s chic, surrealist musical was one of the most anticipated Off Broadway shows of the year, and a star-studded farewell to Sondheim’s final work. Through Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan. Read the review.StereophonicFive members of a rock band try to record a studio album. That’s the premise, which hinges upon heartache, copious drug use and fragile rock star egos, of David Adjmi’s first New York production since 2013, set entirely in a recording studio. It’s a play, not a musical, so it’s not squarely in the song-and-dance category, but the music, written by Will Butler (formerly of Arcade Fire), is chock-full of captivating pop songs and gripping ballads. Through Dec. 17 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. Read the review.For the FaithfulPurlie VictoriousLeslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young star in Ossie Davis’s raucous 1961 comedy, directed by Kenny Leon, about a charismatic preacher who must outwit a plantation owner to buy and restore the local church. The play exposes racism as laughably absurd in a Broadway revival our critic called “scathingly funny.” Through Feb. 4 at the Music Box, Manhattan. Read the review.Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young, center, lead the ensemble cast in a revival of Ossie Davis’s 1961 play, “Purlie Victorious,” at the Music Box Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCovenantIn his New York debut, the playwright York Walker’s Southern gothic, directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, follows a small Georgia town’s reaction to a bluesman’s homecoming. The potent little Off Broadway play, about communing with God and making deals with the Devil, is based on the real-life bluesman Robert Johnson, whose technique inspired rumors that he had traded his soul for musical genius. Through Dec. 17 at Roundabout Underground, Manhattan. Read the review.Nearing ExpirationShuckedIf a cornucopia of puns is your thing, this lowbrow comedic musical about a small-town woman who leaves home to save her corn just might scratch the itch. With a book by Robert Horn, songs by the country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally and campy scenes — including a mini-kickline of plastic corncobs — directed by Jack O’Brien, our critic called the show low humor “but hard not to laugh at.” Through Jan. 14 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan. Read the review.Sleep No MoreArguably one of New York City’s crown jewels of immersive theater, the Hitchcock-style take on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is set to close on Jan. 28 after 12 years. In an enchanting act of voyeurism, audiences members wear masks — the Venetian type, not the health-protecting kind (those are optional) — and follow characters from room to room, into densely packed apothecary dens, eerie miniature forests and dark, elaborate dining halls. Through Jan. 28 at the McKittrick Hotel, Manhattan. Read the review. More

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      Big Apple Circus Review: A Show That Bends Over Backward for You

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      The extraordinary within the everyday: A holiday season rite returns with aerialists, trapeze acts, funny clowns (really!) and cotton candy too.If confetti supplies have plummeted, if a spangle shortage now afflicts Manhattan, blame a tent at the southwestern corner of Lincoln Center. Yes, the Big Apple Circus has returned and for a little over a month New York will glimmer more brightly.In recent years, a return has been less certain. In 2016, after operating as a nonprofit for nearly 40 years, the original outfit shut down and filed for bankruptcy. An affiliate of a corporate restructuring firm bought it in 2017, then switched out its management and character several times. In 2021, it was sold again, to a corporation that counts the famed aerialist Nik Wallenda as a minority owner, and became a bit more death-defying.The German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli has given up using live animals but in one routine three performers pretended to be trained polar bears.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThis season, Big Apple has imported the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, which is mostly a cause for rejoicing. Roncalli stands as a skillful and endearing example of the form, a company steeped in circus classics, yet capable in most if not all ways, of moving with the times.It is sad that New York can no longer support a circus of its own and that Big Apple has become an intellectual property asset rather than a group enmeshed in the life of the city. But there’s nothing like an aerial balance act — or two, as is the case in “Circus Theater Roncalli: Journey to the Rainbow” — to make audiences forget all of that. Besides, this is New York. Who is from here anyway? Call it sequin diplomacy.Last weekend the mood in the tent was giddy and rapturous, with the younger spectators revved up on cotton candy and the older ones excited perhaps by the sight of at least four prestige TV stars sitting near the ring. A clown meandered amid the rows as an orchestra played frisky versions of classical and popular songs.Iryna Galenchyk’s aerial act with her partner is a wonder of strength and grace.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe Roncalli company is steeped in circus classics, with acts like the Kirichenko acrobatic group.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe show proper opens with Noel Aguilar’s fizzy juggling act, which began with batons and continued with Ping-Pong balls. (Ever caught a kernel of popcorn in your mouth? Imagine that, but in time to the music.) The finale involved straw hats, thrown like Frisbees. Aguilar dropped the odd baton and missed the occasional hat, which made the routine more impressive, because it showed what it took to excel.He ceded the stage to Andrey Romanovsky’s rubber leg contortionist act, in which Romanovsky skipped rope while bent over backward. He was replaced by a tightrope walker (the tightropes were, thankfully, near to the ground) and then by an acrobatics act in which the performers were dressed like members of Marie Antoinette’s court. They gave way to Iryna Galenchyk and Vladyslav Drobinko, whose romantic paired aerial act is a wonder of strength and grace. Throughout there were appearances by four clowns, all of whom were legitimately funny, a circus rarity. One, Paquin Jr., had great success with a routine that may have sacrificed a Cabbage Patch doll.The gift of the circus, wherever it’s from, our critic writes, is that it gives a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday.Ye Fan for The New York TimesRoncalli has given up using live animals (a sensible and respectable choice for any circus, though I do miss the Big Apple’s former dog and cat acts). But the second half began with a puzzling routine in which three performers in fur suits pretended to be trained polar bears. This was followed by a bicycle act and a sequence in which three gold-painted performers balanced atop one another, like statues come to life. No less singular, if much more hectic, was Emma Phillips’s foot juggling routine, in which she made an end table and a couple of antimacassars revolve atop her toes. A steampunk bubble routine delighted the children; a trapeze act, featuring Christoph Gobet and Julian Kaiser balancing, impossibly, foot to foot, made their mothers gasp.This is the gift of the circus, wherever it’s from: a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday, a vision of what time, tenacity and a heedless approach to muscle strain can achieve. And cotton candy, too? What glitter. What joy.Big Apple CircusThrough Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; bigapplecircus.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: At the Big Apple Circus, It’s a Family Affair

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      Nepotism babies, performers who were launched into the entertainment industry with a boost from a family member or two, have a bad reputation. Maybe they deserve a better one. During the Big Apple Circus’s “Dream Big,” the latest splendid show to alight beneath its lavish tent in a corner of Lincoln Center’s plaza, second-, third- and fourth-generation performers swoop, swing, somersault and traverse a high wire 20 feet in the air. In the short videos that precede the acts, each credits their success to the mothers, fathers, uncles or grandparents who went into the ring before them. Nik Wallenda, the headliner, can trace his big top lineage back nearly 250 years, as can his 69-year-old mother, Delilah Wallenda, who helps him onto that wire.The Wallenda family executes a truncated version of their signature pyramid tightrope trick.Seth Caplan for The New York TimesRokardy Rodríguez performing a precarious balancing act.Irina Akimova twirls the hula hoops.Sure, these performers started their careers a couple of rungs up the ladder. Then again, that ladder is unstable and balanced atop a tottering platform. So who’s complaining? And who has time to complain when one’s mouth is too busy shrieking in terror and delight?In the past decade, the Big Apple Circus has undergone a few contortions of its own. It filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and re-emerged a year later as a for-profit enterprise. The 2019 show delivered a more grown-up experience, with a ringmistress imported from the adults-only Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and the introduction of some sexed-up acts. The Covid-19 pandemic foreclosed the 2020 season. And though the tent opened again in November 2021, this was weeks before anyone in the 5-to-12 crowd could have been considered fully vaccinated. But now vaccines are available to all, making the one-ring a more comfortable space, and the lineup is meaningfully similar to last year’s, a gesture that assuages any feelings of having missed out.The circus reopened in November 2021, before young children could be considered fully vaccinated. This year’s show is more family-friendly.Seth Caplan for The New York TimesMy family is among those who gave the circus a pass last year. And I had wondered how it would feel to be back — at close quarters, with no masking or vaccine requirements — at the big top again. Would a modifier like “death-defying” mean less when everyone in the tent — performers, spectators — had lived through a global pandemic? Shouldn’t we get spangled costumes, too? And in truth, the evening didn’t begin especially well. There were long lines — in the rain — to walk through metal detectors, and the promised preshow performances never materialized. The main event started 20 minutes late, 15 minutes after an $8 bag of cotton candy had been consumed.But as soon as the curtain opens, wonder makes a swift return. “Dream Big,” directed by Philip Wm. McKinley, is a brisk, back-to-basics experience, smaller and less glitzy than the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey extravaganzas of years past, but brimming with pizazz. There is no Wheel of Death this time, and even the Wallendas seem to fly with just a bit more care. If the show doesn’t tell a story — “Dream Big” is the organizing theme in only the loosest sense — it suggests, welcomingly, that anyone might want to grow up and join the circus, particularly those performers who grew up in it.Johnny Rockett the clown.Seth Caplan for The New York TimesElli Huber on the trapeze.Johnny Rockett up to his antics.After the opening song and dance, the performers desert the petite, red-curtained ring and Elli Huber rises above it, spinning atop a trapeze. The safety wire strapped to her waist is clearly visible, but those, like me, who run a little anxious, may consider that a relief. She is followed by Veranica, a cheerful tween who leads a quintet of trained dogs through a frolicsome routine. Two of her poodles can pilot scooters. Bliss. Gena Cristiani juggles pin upon pin; Rokardy Rodríguez performs a precarious balancing act. Axel Perez, his nephew, swings and sways atop the rolla bola, a platform balanced atop one or more rolling cylinders. TanBA, a magician who had surprising success on “Britain’s Got Talent,” presents a frantic, pop-eyed act in which he swallows a dozen or more razor blades. (“DO NOT EVER TRY THIS,” I whispered to my children.) After the intermission, Irina Akimova performs a hoop act, and Nik Wallenda and his family perform a truncated version of their famous pyramid act, in which two of them traverse the wire while balancing a third Wallenda — without nets. Truncated is fine!The ringmaster, Alan Silva.Seth Caplan for The New York TimesIn between the defter displays, Johnny Rockett, the clown, lampoons various circus skills. His character is a janitor and general roustabout, angling for a spot in the show. Rockett is of course a third-generation clown and a practiced comedian. But his routine pokes fun at a popular alternative to the nepo baby route — the overconfidence of the mediocre white man. The character he plays can’t do handstands or hula hoop or train dogs with any dexterity. (At the performance I attended, the dog in his act defecated on the stage, an apparent improvisation.) But the show keeps giving him the space to try. Arguably too much space. Three appearances might have been enough. Then again, he dropped a prop light bulb on me to general laughter. So maybe that’s just my wounded dignity talking.The most extraordinary act is among the simplest, an unpretentious silks routine performed by the ringmaster, Alan Silva, a sixth-generation circus performer. Silva is a little person, standing at 3 feet 10 inches. In his early life, as he says in the video that precedes his act, he was bullied for his height and urged toward clowning. But he dreamed of an aerial act instead. When he removes his frock coat and abandons himself to the silks, he really seems to fly. It’s a dream come true, through practice and audacity. And it’s as big as anything.Big Apple CircusThrough Jan. 1 at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; bigapplecircus.com. More

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      David Arquette on Filming the New 'Scream' and Bozo the Clown

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      The “Scream” actor is on a mission to make people reconsider clowns — including himself.“Bozo is my hero,” David Arquette said on a chilly Sunday morning, as he spray painted a Frisbee-sized red circle on a warehouse brick wall in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. “We want to let that clown out.”Dressed a bit clownish himself in a Bozo trucker cap, Mickey Mouse-pattern Vans and white jeans with a pair of pink tiger-stripe wrestling tights, Mr. Arquette, 50, who used to run with a graffiti-art crew in Los Angeles, was putting the finishing touches on a six-foot-tall rendition of Bozo the Clown.Bozo is not only Mr. Arquette’s muse these days, but also his business. Earlier this year, Mr. Arquette, who is the youngest member of the Arquette acting clan, secured the rights to the character once billed as “the world’s most famous clown” from the estate of Larry Harmon, who popularized the character.“We first have to help rehabilitate the image of a clown,” said Mr. Arquette, as he took a step back from his painting and pursed his lips with approval. “I want to help bring back kind clowns, and change the discourse. You know, help people understand that being silly is cool.”As he sees it, clowns have been unfairly maligned. “There’s a lot of negative history,” Mr. Arquette said. “There was ‘Poltergeist.’ There was Stephen King and ‘It.’ That was a real problem. And then the Joker and Krusty the Clown.”“Clowns,” he added, “are a reflection of society. And right now the scary clown is sort of where we are.”He would love to bring Bozo back to TV. Various children’s television shows featuring the red-wigged clown ran for decades. For a moment, he almost succeeded in bringing Bozo to life at the Empire Circus, a new interactive carnival adventure that was supposed to open at the Empire Stores in Brooklyn this month, before supply-chain disruptions put it on hold.“All my humor comes from me being the butt of the joke,” said Mr. Arquette, who will reprise his role in “Scream” next year. Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn a sense, Mr. Arquette sees himself as Kind Clown Test Case No. 1. “All my humor comes from me being the butt of the joke,” he said. “All of my flaws and my stuff.”In the 1990s, he found himself in the celebrity circus, thanks to scene-stealing roles as Dewey Riley, the charming if quirky deputy in the “Scream” slasher movie franchise, and his off-camera role as the charming if quirky husband of his “Scream” co-star Courteney Cox.Scruffy, awkward and every-dude relatable, he was the perfect anti-Hollywood mascot for Generation X.Or maybe he was a little too Gen X. Partying with the abandon of a Seattle rocker, Mr. Arquette battled with alcohol abuse, made headlines with drunken binges and saw his divorce play out in the tabloids before a second career as a professional wrestler, a move that may have tanked his reputation in both professions.But now he’s back — maybe. In January, Mr. Arquette is reheating his Dewey character in the 25th anniversary reboot of “Scream,” which also features Ms. Cox (they are divorced now) and Neve Campbell, another original cast member, facing off against a new ghost-faced killer for Generation Z.Remarried, sober and living a quiet life in Nashville, he said he hopes to jump start a movie career that had descended largely into bit parts and voice-over work. And this time, Mr. Arquette said, he is emotionally equipped to handle it.As the youngest brother of five siblings in a fourth-generation acting family that included his sisters Rosanna (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and Patricia (“True Romance”), he felt ambivalent about joining the family business: “I always felt like, ‘Uh, my sisters are doing it, my dad does it. I don’t know if I have talent.’”One path that seemed open was to play the goof, eventually finding fame as the oddball among oddballs in the “Scream” movies, themselves highly meta sendups of ’80s slasher films.Looking back, he said he was not emotionally prepared for the Hollywood glare. “I’m socially awkward,” Mr. Arquette said, “so I used to walk into a situation and dress really flashy and say, ‘OK, look at me, talk about me, look at me.’ Or, I’d drink to be outrageous or different. They were coping mechanisms.”His detour into wrestling was his most outrageous move of all.It was not insincere. Mr. Arquette was a lifelong fan who got to live out a dream following his starring role in “Ready to Rumble,” a wrestling comedy from 2000. “Just getting to see behind the curtain and learn some of the secrets of the trade, it was really a joy for me,” he said.Mr. Arquette secured the rights to Bozo the Clown earlier this year.  Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWrestling fans bristled, however, when the World Champion Wrestling anointed him with the heavyweight title in 2000. His Hollywood agents bristled too.As the acting roles began drying up, he struggled with anxieties and addiction, as he recounted in the warts-and-all 2020 documentary of his wrestling career, “You Cannot Kill David Arquette.”The nadir came when a wrestler named Nick Gage accidentally gouged Mr. Arquette in the neck with a broken fluorescent light tube in a 2018 match, leaving him gushing blood and calling out to his friend Luke Perry, who was sitting ringside, to ask if he was dying.Since then, his life has settled down a bit. Mr. Arquette lives with his new wife, Christina McLarty Arquette, a film producer and former Entertainment Tonight correspondent, and their two children, Charlie, 7, and Gus, 4.After he finished spray painting Bozo (with the building owner’s permission), Mr. Arquette strolled the grafitti-covered neighborhood, pausing to admire the street art.“I haven’t seen anybody, I don’t go out anymore,” said Mr. Arquette, stopping at a lamppost to apply a sticker for the upcoming “Scream.” “I mean, if you don’t drink and you’re not looking to meet girls, there’s nothing out there.”Making the reboot meant working with his ex-wife again. “I mean, we’re co-parents, so we see each other a lot,” Mr. Arquette said, referring to their 17-year-old daughter, Coco. “But when you work with someone you have a certain history with, there’s a built in, natural — it’s not acting at that point. You’re really truly experiencing emotions and life.” More

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      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