‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ is back as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus returns to CT

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus is back, seven years after having supposedly delivered its final death-defying act.

The comeback is big enough to warrant two Connecticut stops less than two months apart at the Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport on March 15-17 and the XL Center in Hartford on May 3-5.

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus (often shortened to just “Ringling” in advertisements) has been resurrected by the same company, Feld Entertainment, that shut it down in 2017. The circus has been extensively rethought for its reemergence with three “show guides” replacing the single ringmaster model and several small performance areas surrounding one large central one rather than the old three-ring set-up. There are also no animal acts, a change that Ringling Bros. had already made in the final years of its previous circus.

The loss of the circus was profoundly felt, especially in Connecticut, the lifelong home of P.T. Barnum. One of the shapers of the American circus as we know it, Barnum was born in Bethel, ran a newspaper in Danbury, owned a general store in Grassy Plains, invested in a clock factory to boost the economy of East Bridgeport, served three years in the Connecticut House of Representatives and one year as mayor of Bridgeport and started his own lottery business, to name just a few of his local activities. Barnum also inspired one of the top stars of his circus, General Tom Thumb, to buy a mansion on the Thimble Islands.

Bridgeport was where the Barnum & Bailey circus, including its animals, spent its winters, the season when it was not on tour.

The greatest tragedy in circus history, the Hartford circus fire of 1944, happened when a tent caught fire and caused over 160 deaths and over 700 injuries, leading to national changes in fire prevention practices. The Hartford Circus Memorial was created in 2004 on the Barbour Street site where the big top’s main tent post had been.

The new show boasts 75 performers from 18 countries. Sometimes several acts are performing at the same time.

The rebirth was fueled by a simple phrase, one that comes up a lot when talking to a Feld executive and two of the circus’ stars: “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Jonathan Vaught, Feld Entertainment’s senior vice president of production and touring show operations, has been with the company for decades. He remembers when the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey tours ended and has been instrumental in bringing them back.

“We started fresh,” Vaught said, “but one of the things we knew was that people had very positive feelings about the name Ringling. We had a lot of good material to work with even though we were coming at this with a blank sheet of paper. The development timeline was longer than anything we’ve done in a while. We were already full speed ahead on this pre-COVID. Once our other shows got restarted, we turned out attention to this project.”

Feld was one of the first producers to get arena-scale shows back on the road following the pandemic. The company’s other productions include Disney on Ice, Monster Jam, Marvel Universe Live and Jurassic World Live, all of which have visited Connecticut arenas numerous times. “Ringling, even when it closed, was at the heart of this organization,” Vaught said, adding that it was a massive undertaking and a coordinated effort throughout the company.

“We started with the idea of focusing on incredible performers,” Vaught said. “For the design, the term ‘ultimate playground’ kept coming up, so that’s what we built. It’s one big circular stage but there are areas around that too. There are different acts happening close to every part of the audience. Every seat has something special happening near it. In the opening number, there’s stuff happening everywhere. You don’t know where to look.

“It’s a very hard show to describe, so many remarkable moments that keep coming at you,” Vaught added. “There’s so much content. That’s a good problem to have. The pacing is important, making sure we don’t stay in one mode for too long.”

The sense of variety is also important when considering the breadth of the audience. “We are a family show in every sense,” Vaught said. “We need to amuse the entire family, not just the kids, not just the moms and dads, all of them.”

That family friendliness goes hand in hand with affordability, Vaught said. “Coming to see this show doesn’t break the budget. It’s accessible from that standpoint. The number one goal is to entertain. At the end of the day, we need to deliver ‘The Greatest Show on Earth.’”

Two of the characters who replace the old ringmaster role have enjoyed being a key part of the reinvention.

Jan Damm, who plays Nick Nack, is one of the new set of show guides. He has performed with small circuses around the country and teaches circus arts in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he lives. “I’ve been a professional circus performer for 17 years,” Damm said. “I juggled when I was a kid, got serious after college and went to San Francisco to train at a circus school. I’ve done every kind of circus you can imagine except the two biggest ones, Cirque du Soleil and Ringling Bros.

“I was offered this job in September of 2022,” Damm added. “They were looking for someone who could bring several circus skills to the character. The directors and the Felds also made it clear that they wanted the characters to fit the performers and not the other way around. They wanted the personality of each individual to come through.”

Another of the show guides, Lauren Irving who plays Aria, agreed. Her background is not in circus entertainment but in musical theater, Walt Disney and Universal Studios theme park shows and ocean cruises, where she just played Catherine of Aragon in a Norwegian Cruise Lines production of the musical “Six”. She sings multiple songs in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey show, both originals and covers, some of which she helped choose. She sings the Rihanna hit “Diamonds” during one of the aerialist acts and even leads “a song we create with the audience every show,” using sound samples taken from the crowd and then looped. In one of the original songs she actually gets to sing the words “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

This is at odds with the sort of circuses that have developed in the last several decades, exemplified by Cirque du Soleil, which can seem more design and concept-driven. “We understand what distinguishes our show from other circuses,” Damm said. “This is not a fantasy world we’re creating. There’s no theatrical pretense, it’s real people.”

While there are no live animal acts, there is a dog in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus: Bailey, a robotic pup who interacts with Nick Nack. “I’m her human,” Damm said. “She’s like a character you might see in a Pixar movie.”

“We’ve wrapped ourselves in our new reimagined version,” Irving said, “but there’s also over 150 years of history, the merging of those visions all those years ago. If you were able to compare the very first circus to what we have now, it would be so different from now, but that very first seed is still there.”

“People still have a craving for that entertainment, that escape,” she said.

The third show guide is a percussionist named Sticks, played by Alex Stickels. There’s another lead character played by unicyclist Wesley Williams, who is “finding his place” in the circus realm, Damm explained. In the show, Williams repeats his world record feat of the highest unicycle ride at 34½ feet.

“The traditional ringmaster became increasingly obsolete,” Damm said of the change to a trio of characters. “It was more of a reference point. The audience is more educated now. They don’t need to be told about something. They don’t need to be told to be amazed. They just need to be shown the amazing thing.”

The new circus boasts traditional acts like trapeze artists (George Caceres and the Flying Caceres), aerialists (Giulia and Mattia Rossi, Kaity Mussio and Maximillian Bennett), highwire artists (the Lopez Family), acrobats (Black Diamond Trio, Duo Dust in the Wind) balancing acts (Gemini Twins) and, of course, clowns (the Equivokee trio from Ukraine).

There are also more contemporary circus styles like the folk-dancing Argendance troupe and the BMX bike ensemble Freestyle RIders. A separate BMX circus act, 360 ALLSTARS, played Connecticut earlier this month at the Garde Arts Center in New London, but Damm said the “difference is the scale. They’re riding on giant vertical ramps.”

The singular “Double Wheel of Destiny” act performed by the Navas Troupe, a twice-as-wild variation on the routine where acrobats dive in and out of gigantic rotating wheels that twist and turn in mid-air.

This is Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s grand return to Connecticut, a state which helped develop the circus as we know it and has hosted some of the most innovative circuses of our times.

“Connecticut will always be at the crossroads of the circus,” Damm said. “It’s important for us to bring it back there.”

The Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus has two upcoming appearances in Connecticut: March 15-17 at Total Mortgage Arena, 600 Main St., Bridgeport (Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 11 a.m., 3 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.; $34.95-$91.50; totalmortgagearena.com) and May 3-5 at the XL Center, 1 Civic Center Plaza, Hartford (Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 11 a.m., 3 and 7 p.m. and Sunday at noon and 4 p.m.; $34.50-$113.35; xlcenter.com). Further details are at ringling.com/show/.