Sunday Morning with Agent A: Why the "Flying" Wallendas? ...

A most vexing issue that has long vexed me is the apparent willingness of the Wallenda family to tolerate this egregious misnomer of what their act on the high wire is about. Karl Wallenda must be worn out six feet under from spinning in frustration. Nothing better exemplifies this shameless injustice to the legacy of one of Spangeland's greatest circus families than a cheap sit-com crack: "I don't give a flying Wallenda!" Horror of horrors that the survivors of the tragic Detroit fall should have to be subjected to such colossally crude insensitivity. But blame, yes blame a fractured family in part for the crack having been uttered.The best answer I've so far got was that "flying" attached itself to the image of their Detroit fall...

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Saturday Slide Bys: Laliberte Lands Hollywood Star ... Shrine Evansville Exits Roberts Stadium ... Media Critics Tackle Listless PBS Circus

Guy Laliberte, right, with James L. Cameron at the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. Photo by Todd Duffey/PR Photos.First Draft Reckless: Cirque du Soleil's creative-marketing genius Guy Laliberte landing his own Walk of Fame Star along famed Hollywood Boulevard last Monday, his enshrined sparkle marking the 2,424th time a celeb from some avenue in showbiz has been honored. Event neatly combined with (possibly inspired by) local ceremony in front of Kodak Theatre, near Highland Boulevard, where Cirque's Iris show is slated to begin courting audiences (it better appeal to the Japanese) next July 21 ... Appearing with the Cirque King was Oscar-winning director James Cameron ... Iris being billed "a lyrical, fanciful, kinetic foray into cinema,...

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When Circus Flyers Flew High Over Bloomington, A Town Itself Was a Great Circus School

The Flying Wards, circa 1920. Illinois State University, Milner Library Special Collections.Finally, yet another revelation (or belated realization if I sound too melodramatic) has hit me in the face. There is a legitimately productive circus school in the United States of America (as opposed to Russia or China, Peru or ...) that turns out top flying trapeze acts. A real school that fills American circus rings with thrilling twisters and twirlers, spinners and somersaulting daredevils high over the sawdust circles.Ooops -- make that past tense. Rewind back by a few decades when it was actually in operation. And I suppose we're really taking a town and its circus-friendly culture more than one particular school. The town is Bloomington,...

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PBS at the Big Apple Circus, Last Rueful Impressions

Not a happy trouper: Glen Heroy felt "invisible" and ignored by managementPerhaps that I should actually see the entire show was not meant to be. About six minutes ago, 9:52 PST, the first hour of tonight's repeat went dead. So did all the other channels, owing to Comcast having a problem. Last week, KQED was to blame.I'm still not sure what to write. My late good friend Mike used to talk about, I think, the three emotions, any of which could keep the customer hooked on a movie or play: make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, or scare them to death. He might have added, if you can't deliver on any of those fundamentals, simply try to charm and delight 'em. On rare occasions, that's about the best Circus could do.Here are some random thoughts...

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Sunday Morning From China: Shanghai New

I fell in love with the building on the right. It floats skyward. It feels transcendentalWe're in the new section of the city across the Huangpu riverBoyi's angular photography intrigues meInside this store on Nanjing Road, I could not believe I was in ChinaAround People's Park near Nanjing Road in old ShanghaiEven the old town, here on the Nanjing Road pedestrian mall, feels refreshingly modern. A clean prosperous buzz in the air reminded me of Times Square NY -- minus a hundred million people just getting off of the train.The Huangpu river separates old from newWe took these pictures last April. For the best documentary I've seen on modern China, try to locate the film, China Revealed, produced by Lion Television for the Discovery...

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Saturday Slide Bys: UniverSoul Circus Not So Black Anymore; Cirque Cusine for the Lucky; Money Woes for Big Tops Big and Little ...

First Draft Random: Big difference between "traditional" circuses and UniverSoul, says the show's director of operations Ben Johnson, "is its target audience." And that's not me. And that's why it may never be a breeze to catch this show, unless I'm in the mood for risking getting mugged. I'd love to see what the show's up to these days, for one, less black acts from the U.S., more from abroad. Owner Cedric Walker, talking to a reporter in Memphis, TN, last August, conceded what most of us already know, favoring the superior "quality of acts that come from foreign countries." ... Paul Binder, after birthing his Big Apple Circus in 1977, vowing to present local acts trained in his circus school, soon came to grips with the same reality, deferring to those super stars from Over There...

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PBS Leaves Big Apple Tent Before the Show is Over: Strange Disjointed End to a Scattered Take on Circus Life

[Update: I called the local PBS station; they say technical difficulties caused the second hour not to be shown. It is being repeated next week on another of their channels. I'm going to watch the Monte Carlo episode]Was that all there was my friend? -- as Peggy Lee would sing. Then let's keep dancing. Let's hope for a better season.I don't know how to begin this. Such a strange fragmented evening that almost didn't happen. For the first fifteen minutes here in the S.F. Bay Area of tonight's last scheduled two hours of Circus, I sat munching on popcorn while gazing at a notice on my TV: Please Stand By; We Are Having Technical Difficulties.When finally they got the show rolling, we were, I think, in the backyard. No, make that somewhere around one of the LaSalle brothers, ruing the...

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Sunday Morning, Looking Back: Who's Show is the Truest? The Most Hip? The Purest? The Most Unpretentious? Bring on the Circus Cultural Wars

Traces from 7 Fingers, at the Broadway Playhouse in ChicagoOh, the scourge of commercial circuses compared to those more enlightened ones publicly funded. Oh, may I ad, the folly of such self-serving illusions. The evil of animal acts! The insulting overkill of three rings, gone at last! The absence of a direct through-line into the soul of the artist as living breathing human being! And, now, horror of horrors, that you should ever be tagged as being "corporate." Yet another new nagging trend may be on the horizon: the substitution of that one remaining ring for the stage.Luckily for me, a circus agnostic, I was raised amidst two durable forms -- the exemplary one-ring Polack Bros. Circus, which played Santa Rosa two days in the late...

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Saturday Slide Bys: A Covington Cameo on PBS & Other Misc. Goodies Randomly Down the Runs ,,, Well, Have You Anything Better to Do?

Cyber Courier Don Covington, a Mighty Contributor to this here blog in the form of captured news stories about circus lore from far and wide that he e-dispatches my way, landing his 15 seconds of fame in Circus, the PBS doc slowly fizzling out before our eyes. We spot him answering a complaint by clown Glen Heroy about frozen water in his trailer. Notes Don about his brief cameo, one reason he may not have reaped more air time is because he was "shadowing the PBS crews." And a good giving shadow was Don, evidently letting see-all cameras poke revealingly about the premises; my, what filthy restroom conditions are the crews stuck with over there! Did you see? And here I wondered about the leaky Kelly-Miller clown alley truck ... About Circus, Paul Binder's soft humble honesty moved me....

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Big Apple Circus on PBS: Paul Binder's Retirement Highlights An Evening of Sad Stories Beneath and Behind an Unspectacular Big Top

Maybe circus is not as much a family as my niece, Lisa, feels good thinking it is after having discovered, last week, the first of three installments of the PBS series, Circus. She called me this afternoon from Virginia, and we talked about the show we were both high on. This evening, I didn't feel so high. For a show about the circus, there was an awful lot of sadness. So many little stories, both personal and professional, more troubling than triumphal. Saddest and most disappointing of all, the lack of a splashy opening night in New York with reviews, etc. Not the drama I expected. They got to NY, and on the way, the tent was full of empty seats, shockingly empty. Mime Les Feres Taquin, in a surprising fit of candor, stated "the...

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PBS Returns to Circus Tonight: Will Binder Blow His Top Again? Can Lubin Control His Ego? Will the Bomb Kid Return? & How Will Steve Smith Cope?

Are you geared up for tonight's hours 2 and 3 of the 6-hour Big Apple Circus documentary, Circus, on PBS? I am for sure. Can't wait.Last week's first two hours were sufficiently entertaining, mainly because the cameras rolled while familiar BAC figures revealed very-human personality traits I'd not known about. We got to see founder Paul Binder in anger meltdown. We watched Barry Lubin pushing around new clown Glen Heroy, trying to lock him into strait jacket direction. Look over there. Right hand move this way. Now turn. Pause. Look up! No, not right. Do it again!And, in dubious retrospect, I asked myself: Hmmmm, yes, hmmmm. Let's see. Director Steve Smith ran the Ringling Clown College for ten years; in fact, he was a Ringling...

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An American in Paris: In It's Ageless Magic, I Rue the Demise of Romanticism

Will the generation now growing up on hip hop power, or on Britney and her peers, ever in a future day, then wrapping their emotions around the songs and cinematic images they once embraced, feel anything close to what I embraced a few evenings ago watching the MGM musical, An American in Paris?Or are we all doomed to the replay of feelings as distinctly different as were the entertainment forms that first engendered those feelings? The fifties was a romantic era. Few people resisted the artifice of "breaking into song" as they now do. Today’s younger set responds to sounds and images decidedly more smug, more cynical. Some would argue, more realistic. Perhaps they simply will never feel what I felt, nor what I still feel when confronted...

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Sunday Morning with Frank Braden: Rack Up Another Record Ringling Ramble ...

"Confounding big top strategists and its own high command, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus last spring began topping its 1948 banner Manhattan business even before it opened the 1949 season in Madison Square Garden.By April first, the advance mail orders for seats had reached a new high. Modest, but striking, display ads in the New York newspapers had precipitated the golden deluge of check-enclosed letters, for these ads alone annually inform the New York public of the when, where and how for ticket purchases by mail. Then, as the lines stormed the selling windows in the Garden, John Ringling North's 1949 edition of The Greatest Show on Earth, the best in 79 years, was in the bag before the band played opening night.New...

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Open Memo to John Ringling North II: Please Hire Steve Smith To Direct Your Circus

Dear Mr. North,In lieu of a cell call (I don't have your number) or a letter (time is of the essence), or a Twittergram (I've not yet taken up texting or tweeting or -- the latest -- micro-chanting) I am using this platform to reach you, optimistically assuming you will not deem my open memo pushy, but understandably urgent, trusting it will find its way to your attention. either in Oklahoma or Ireland.I think I've found the perfect director for your show. His name is Steve Smith; you may observe this effervescent soul in action on the PBS series, Circus, about the making of a Big Apple Circus show. He strikes me as amply savvy to circus programing, a decisive figure yet armed with loads of lovely humanity for the job, not the type to traumatize your favored artists (or those...

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Sunday Morning, Looking Back: PBS Under the Big Top -- Accidental Revelations Add Fits of Fire to Underwhelming Big Apple Circus Reality Show ...

This first appeared on November 4, 2010It grows on you in its own ersatz reality show way. It held my attention, despite a feeling that this story could have been as effectively told in half the time.There is little of the drama here we expect of such an entity. Don't think the intensely emotional making of Cirque du Solei's Varekai on HBO several years back. Don't think even those contrived circus competition shows on TV. And certainly don't think The Greatest Show on Earth.Circus is pleasant and agreeable. And not a little informative. Guest director that season, Steve Smith (left) is a winning asset, a likable spark plug, full of zest -- a nuts and bolts man for a show whose theme and its manifestations throughout are never adequately...

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"Banana Shpeel" (Remember, from Cirque du Soleil?) Slips Off Silenty, At Last, That Way to the Egress

Clowns Unwanted: From Banana Shpeel. Many disgruntled critics blamed them for mucking up an otherwise modest package of very good circus turns.Cirque du Solei King Laliberte evidently was undaunted by the nasty reviews his stage vaudeville show suffered in Chicago, to a lesser degree in New York.But he apparently is not up to dealing with insufficient crowds not swamping his box office ticket windows.Following its aborted "limited" New York run at the Beacon Theatre, Banana Shpeel, to my awestruck surprise, looked to be hitting the road, first stop, city of my questionable birth: San Francisco. So I really wanted to take a look. Nothing like seeing for yourself -- how unfairly dissed it might have been, or what a colossal turkey it was. ...

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