The Morning Midway: Sabu Trumpets Freely Into Another Pond ... Splashy Biz Fills the Big Top ...

Covington connected, I read that Circus Knie's errant elephant Sabu, developing a sure reputation for running off to her own beat and finding water in which to merrily splash, is at it again. First it was Lake Zurick on June 6 for a mighty mammoth swim. Garnered global headlines. Now the 26-year-old big trunk "staged a second getaway," as reported by no less than Bloomberg News, this time taking a dainty dip into a stream.

So, how did Sabu manage to "escape," or did she? Had she, in fact, been assisted by cunning press agents hungry to grab free media attention and prove their mettle? Swiss newspaper 20 Minutes flaunted a snapshot of the prima pachyderm lumbering back to the show, surrounded by her entourage of wary handlers, probably giggling inside over the incident.

Business? Opening show in Basel was sold out a day before the opening. All eyes are now on one elephant.

If this bull-headed behemoth can make the escape act a permanent part of her repertoire, she could be the toast of Madison Square Garden, assuming the Felds can lure her into a stateside contract. Complete with built-in rest and relaxation at a pond in Central Park.

Perrier for Sabu.

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The Morning Midway: Original Ringling Showtunes Deserve Retrospective Recognition ...

What's the best damn original song ever written for Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey?

I would nominate, hands down, a Henry Sullivan-John Murray Anderson collaboration for the 1951 opus, "Popcorn and Lemonade." As orchestrated by Victor Young for the movie, The Greatest Show on Earth. It shimmers in its glory, though nobody ever heard it that way under the big top.

You're already leaping to the defense of Young's great title song for the movie?

Ah ha, yes, I know, but that was not written for Ringling-Barnum; it was composed for De Mille's film.

Under the aegis of John Ringling North, hands down again, I'd argue the circus moved to the best original ditties composed for its various parades and production numbers.

The Sullivan-Anderson catalog (I've not heard it all, because not all of their work made it onto wire recordings), also gives us the equally glorious, "Picnic in the Park," and the 1951 spec rouser, "Sing a Happy Song."

And there's a remarkably intense number the two created that deserves special status, certainly in melody making: "Jungle Drums." It scored the darkly exotic 1950 finale elephant bash.

I was watching Mike Martin's Ringling-Barnum Vol 1 today, and there it was. You get teasing glimpses of what "Drums" looked and moved like, but you simply can not know what it was like to have sat in the audience when the whole thing unfolded start to finish before your eyes.

Composer North himself, prolifically ambitious, contributed some of the best Ringling show music, believe it or not, and Merle Evans, with his bent for big top fanfare, found ways to pump additional sentiment and excitement into the owner's tuneful melodies. The 1955 show contains North's best set by far, perhaps partly inspired by lyrics from a real Broadway pro, Irving Caesar, from the pulsing "Holidays" to the bouncy "Mamas' in the Park." Also, "Impossible" was tremendously effective in context when introduced during the Pinito Del Oro single trap thriller.

Outside of Victor Young's noteworthy treatments on the GSOE movie album, Big Show songs have never received effective professional studio treatment. Sadly, they likely never will.

A slate of North's tune's came out from RCA in the 1960s as Circus Brass. Only minimally pleasing. Some of his best tunes, like the lovely "Butterfly Lullaby" and the atmospheric "Minnehaha," are missing.

Harold Ronk issued a fine LP, A Day at the Circus With Mr. Singing Ringmaster, but most of the tunes are not drawn from original Ringling scoring. I'm surprised he didn't record Richard Barstow's zippy 1968 opener, "Take a Ride on a Bubble.

I've never heard Igor Stravinsky's "Circus Polka", written under a commission for North's "Ballet of the Elephants" in 1942. And, of course, is there a mortal alive who has ever heard any of the original music composed by the original Ringling brothers for their opera specs?

Nor had I mentioned a number of recent melodically savvy originals composed for the Felds version of the show. Some, upon first hearing, struck me as nearly Broadway worthy, like the recent "Zing Zang Zoom"

North's music composed for the indoor years fell fairly flat to my ears; finally, I realized what might have been missing: Merle Evans. The bandmaster at work then, Izzy Cervone, did not have it in him to fancy up and fanfare North's tunes into effective circus razzmatazz ... What Evans did with "Your birthday," the tag melodic closer to the '55 spec, still moves me as much as any Ringling original. Well, okay, Maestro Evans piles onto it a sky-high climax worthy of a march through the pearly Gates.

Please, somebody, make these songs a project!

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The Morning Midway: Photos Hot Off the Set of "Water For Elephants."

Looks mighty real to me. Only glaring incongruity I can see so far are box cars supposedly posing as circus stock cars.

A slew of wagon charmers said to be on loan from Circus World Museum. Hope they have a cut of the royalties.








Christoph Waltz as "August." He looks cool.



Star Robert Pattinson, center, on the set. If this guy's a national "heartthrob," I'm the last one to know it. I still wish Sean Penn had made it into the film, somewhere. He seemed so right for a gritty circus flick.

Yet to appear: Betty White.

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The Morning Midway: Sabu Takes a Trumpeting Dip in Lake Zurich

What exactly was on her mind as she lumbered freely and willfully through Zurich's upscale banking district (a 401K deposit, per chance?), ending up in Lake Zurich for a brief dip in the waters.

Circus Knie elephant Sabu took a Sunday stroll through the city after managing to free herself from showbiz obligations. Swiss police chased the runaway pachyderm for an hour before a keeper could reign her back into spangled captivity.

With Sabu returned to a trailer, the show moved on, Just all in a day's work.

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Sunday Morning, Looking Back: Big Tops Perennially in Peril -- Cliche or Chronic Destiny???

This first appeared on June 7, 2010

Surviving a train wreck in De Mille's classic film, The Greatest Show on Earth

I am starting to reexamine my skeptical view of one circus movie or drama after another pushing the near bankrupt big top as central theme.

Maybe, out there in the real world, it’s always been this way?

Two sources are driving my new-found doubts: Lane Talburt's well-researched Bandwagon article, "From Deming to Deland," about the behind-the-scenes financial maneuvering that transferred the bankrupt Clyde Beatty Circus in 1956, out of the hands of failed owner Clyde Beatty himself, into the hands of Jerry Collins, Frank McClosky and Walter Kernan.

Exhibit Two: Numerous letters received in my mid teen years from old time circus aficionado Harry “Doc” Chapman, also serving up a steady banquet of doom and gloom predictions about the mighty Ringling show, from which, a sample crack:

“Mike Todd was suppose to have offered $750,000 for the show as it closed at Pittsburgh last season. He wanted everything. North would not sell out to him I heard. You may be able to buy it in a few years at your own price. Then you’ll be D. Ringling Bros. Hammarstrom I hope.”

Very funny, reading it looking back. Chapman, who was born the year before the Ringling Bros. started up their own circus in 1884 (and told me that Barnum & Bailey’s 1914 spec, Wizard Prince of Arabia, was the “best” one he’d seen), seemed to revel in the bleak aftermath of the fall of the final Ringling big top for in 1956, merrily sprinkling raindrops of doom and gloom onto my boyhood fantasies of imminent canvas resurrection in Ringling land.

Hmmm, that sounds an awful lot like the way certain people I know in Sarasota go on, year after year after ...

Even De Mille’s movie, The Greatest Show on Earth, early into the melodramatic footage pushed that old cliche, in a fresh variation, “Will we stay out for only 10 weeks or get a full season?”

Chapman liked to tell me in his lengthy missives about fans who could not wait each week to read in the Billboard of great business under big tops that was not in fact happening. Another laugh, I suppose. I did not like that. I believed in those dramatic Billboard headlines “Straw Houses Greet Hunt Bros. ... Mills Spotty in Tennessee ... ” Chapman often claimed that the Ringling show was rarely pulling in more than 2,500 to maybe 4,000 people (into an eight-thousand seat tent).

When you think about it, how could it not be this way? After all, circus owners every season face the same old problem in luring ticket buyers back into their tops: They have a NEW show, not same old same old. But in the public’s collective mind, certainly truer today than one hundred years ago, circuses are basically the same — unlike a new stage musical, movie or rock concert. And so maybe that’s the bugaboo that makes trouping such a vexing, hazardous, daunting, muddy — oh, heck, you fill in your own words — challenge/ordeal/saga/calling.

Clyde Beatty proved he did not have the right stuff to keep a tent show on the road for very long. Mr. McClosky proved he did have the right stuff.

In fact, troupers disprove Harry “Doc” Chapman every season when, somehow, someway, they still hit the sawdust trails, still high hopping their way from one town to the next.

So let’s bring out Mr. Chapman one more time, just for the fun of it:

“Back in 1954, in the backyard here while taking with Merle Evans, Pat Valdo and others I said the circus was doomed. They almost wanted to run me off the lot but only a year made my prediction come true. It seemed strange that the troupers could not understand this.”

Stranger still that Mr. Chapman could not understand what those redoubtable troupers may have felt down deep in their blood ...

“Hey, Buttons! —- Brad says we play the full season!”

Well, what do you know.

6.7.10

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The Morning Midway: The Faceless Frank McClosky Makes a Faceless Cameo in Bandwagon

I have no idea who this man was, and likely never will. Of all the figures who have owned and moved circuses, Mr. M. is a total blank to me. I see a cigar in his mouth, a man perhaps finally being able to get himself snapped into a publicity photo. A man perhaps in his own mind a big player.

Not to be critical, I recall one of the best shows I ever saw, Beatty-Cole in Richmond, VA, 1961, what a crackling straight ahead 3-ring tentbuster. It sparkled that afternoon. Although it was, they will tell you, McClosky's partner, Walter Kernan, whose passion for the art of the performance is said to have informed and helped shape the generally strong shows. That's what Ken Dodd and a few others have advanced.

McClosky? He has always been a dead figure in my mind. Bring him to life, anybody out there who may wish to inject a little blood into his flat veins. Bright pink cool aid would do. All of the other circus tycoons give off personality, be they true impresarios or borderline crooks.

This came to mind, reading part two (did I miss part one?) of a detailed account by Lane Talburt in the latest issue of Bandwagon, covering the ownership conversion of the Clyde Beatty Circus in the mid-50's away from poor Mr. Beatty, who had to accept a buy out from Jerry Collins (he has a personality!), McClosky, et all, and then, once-again, a performer only status, in the wake of the collapse of his circus during the disastrous 1956 season. That's when King Bros. ended up stranded on a highway ditch, when the mighty Ringling-Barnum big top said bye bye, world, at Pittsburgh, PA.

Name any one you want: John Strong, Otto Ringling, Ben Davenport, Louis Stern, Binder or Byrd, Vargas or Feld or Laliberte -- they all have distinctive personas, whether you like what they have or not.

Frank McClosky? Who he?

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The Morning Midway: Return of the Circus Courier -- Ringling is Coming At You!

Just in my dying mailbox, a gigantic glossy fold-out flyer bearing the imposing words:

BARNUM'S FUNUNDRUM

Wow!

I haven't been dazzled by anything this visually circus-captivating in how many years, if ever?

Feld Entertainment is certainly taking an older bolder kind of marketing campaign.

Brilliant design. Outstanding textual clarity, kept to a minimum.

OPENING NIGHT TICKETS $15!

Unfolded, my 12" wide invitation stands 22" tall and just might make a visit to my wall. Colors: Radiant Ringling Red, Baby Barnum Blue, and Florida sunshine yellow.

The concept reminds me of what they were doing, on a much much smaller scale, during the last years of the John Ringling North era.

Spectacular!

Oh wait, it's addressed to me with a preferred customer code. Possibly because of a previous on-line ticket purchase. 10 weeks in advance.

Eat your hearts out, all of you non-preferred losers.

Gosh, I feel like funundrumming already!

(p.s. oh, why did I have to read deeper. Circus celebrity seat holders will "perform in the show!" Big gigantic wistful sigh, over and out. Does that mean, if I buy the ten dollar ticket, I can bring my own hula hoop?)

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