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The Circus: Gone But Not Forgetten

by John Aquino on 07/17/17

The most famous circus of the world--Barnum & Bailey--stopped performing just over a month ago. There was a great deal of media coverage of the event. But now, a month later, the world goes on. This could be seen as justifying the decision of "the greatest show on earth" to close. In this 21st century world of superhero and fast and furious car chase movies, reality television and a 24/7 news cycle that can air footage of beheadings by terrorist groups, a circus that was a phenomenon over 150 years ago may no longer have a place. 


Maybe not a physical place.

I am no fan of circuses. I remember my father taking my brother Jim and me once and our having to go home because a clown made me cry. A man I worked for told me of the horror he experienced when he did the expected fatherly thing and took his son to the circus. "It was like being trapped in a Fellini movie. Midgets! Dwarfs! Ladies with beards!"

But the idea of a circus was special. It was basic entertainment before movies and television, appealing to a broader audience than Shakespeare and Ibsen and Rossini and Wagner, more wholesome than Minsky. 

Movies realized this. Charlie Chaplin's 1928 silent "The Circus" is less well remembered than "The Gold Rush" or "City Lights" or "The Great Dictator" but in as many ways equally as good, more compact, more efficient, filled with the genuine affection of the greatest movie clown. Carol Reed's "Trapeze" (1956) placed former acrobat Burt Lancaster in the role of a crippled aerialist trying to help a younger man (Tony Curtis) do the triple somersault. Cecil B. DeMille, master of the movie epic, directed a 1952 movie in cooperation with Barnum and Bailey called "The Greatest Show on Earth." It has been derided by many as the worst movie to ever win the best picture Oscar. I like it. It has a an all-star cast that includes Charlton Heston, James Stewart, Cornel Wilde and Betty Hudson, a circus train wreck that is still pretty convincing even in this computer-generated imagery world, and a story that if it were a book would be called a page-turner.

Even on Broadway, there was "Barnum," a 1980 musical with a score by Michael Stewart and Cy Coleman that tells P.T. Barnum's story. Not all that well remembered, it ran over 800 performances and has a jaunty, underrated scope ("Join the circus like you wanted to when your were a kid").

The idea of a circus has affected these other media for a reason that was best articulated in a tv movie called "Barnum," again starring Burt Lancaster, this time playing P.T. Barnum. Lancaster was 73 at the time, four years before he died, and too old for the role by 30 years. But at the end of the movie, speaking as Barnum, he talks to the camera, to us, and explains why Barnum will be remembered. "I invented the audience. I invented you."

Copyright 2017 by John T. Aquino

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