Circuses

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

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

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

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

      by

      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