As a small kid growing up in the 1980s, I truly believed that Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus was the greatest show on earth.
Nothing compared in scale or spectacle. I was hypnotized by the flamboyance of the lion tamer Gunther Gebel-Williams and terrified for the soaring acrobats tempting death. Everything seemed huge and sparkly and full of danger.
By the next decade, Cirque du Soleil, the arty alternative circus that grew into a new kind of juggernaut, made that “greatest show” claim sound a little ridiculous. But when I returned to Ringling Brothers the other night at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, I watched a daredevil horsewoman, a real-life Indiana Jones, duck between the legs of her ride, moving from one side to the other at full gallop, and I was jolted back to the wonder of my childhood.
This show was Barnum's final stop in New York after nearly 150 years of performing, part of the startling end for a storied showbiz institution, for decades a symbol of American ambition. (Its final performance is on May 21.) Long before television and radio invaded homes, the circus was the national entertainment industry, complete with vast marketing campaigns and global talent scouts. Imagine the response to seeing Disney or McDonald's go out of business, and you get a sense of what someone from a century ago would think about Ringling Brothers' closing shop.
The company has faded over the decades, its grandeur eclipsed and its animal acts seeming fusty, but make no mistake：Something irreplaceable will be lost when Ringling closes up its tent for good - a tradition of inspiring awe that connected parent to child, generation to generation.
Ringling didn't invent the circus, whose modern origins date to around the founding of this country, but it supersized it, increasing the blockbuster visuals and the travel. P.T.Barnum and his partners led the first circus to transport its entire show (including animals) on newly built transcontinental railroads and coined the phrase “greatest show on earth.” After joining with another competitor in 1881 to become Barnum and Bailey, they toured Europe, gaining steam before merging with another competitor, Ringling Brothers, in 1907. What resulted was a cultural behemoth.
At Madison Square Garden, its production of “Cleopatra,” showcasing a cast of 1,500, made Elizabeth Taylor's movie look modest.
By the middle of the century, John Ringling North, the circus's impresario for three decades, promised to modernize the show, signing up Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine to make a ballet of elephants. Brooks Atkinson, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, poked fun at the gimmick, before locating the peculiar appeal of the circus. “Nothing save the circus can overpower you with such a tremendous mass of entertainment,” he wrote in 1942. “It is the genius of the circus to give too much of everything.”
The movies of course did the same, and if one were to pinpoint when the torch was passed, it might be when Steven Spielberg's father took him to his first film, Cecil B. DeMelle's portrait of circus life, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” A new showman was born.
