Step Right Up: The Big Apple Circus
Returns to Lincoln Center
Published: 13 December 2008
Britney Spears may have just gotten hip to the Big Apple Circus as a platform to promote her new album, but tens of thousands New York families and circus aficionados have been fans for years. Few things are quite so thrilling as sitting on the edge of your seat in their blue tent at Lincoln Center, as a glittering trapeze artist turns somersaults in the air, or a cossack rider hurls himself off and on a stallion as it gallops around the ring.
Best of all are the clowns, who seem just slightly more confused and deluded than your average New Yorkers, and can make you laugh—sometimes until you cry—with recognition. At the Big Apple, all this happens only yards from where you’re sitting. This one-ring circus takes place in a tent that seats just 1,700 people. No matter where you are seated, you feel you’re in the thick of things.
This year—the Big Apple Circus’s thirty-first season—is especially exciting. For their new show “Play On,” they’ve signed some sensational performers, including the Flying Cortes family; Anna Gosudareva, who trampolines off a Russian barrre to turn multiple somersaults, then lands perfectly on its narrow surface; and the gorgeous LaSalle brothers, twin jugglers, whose rhythmic synchronicity must have started in the womb. In addition, some Big Apple favorites are back in the ring this year: beautiful aerialist Regina Dobrovitskaya, acrobat and tightwire walker Sarah Schwarz, and the beloved clown “Grandma”—aka Barry Lubin.
But 2008 is also a bittersweet year for the circus. Paul Binder, the tall, red-coated ringmaster who founded the Big Apple with partner Michael Christiansen in 1977—and has directed and presided over it ever since—will be retiring from the ring at the end of the season. For a generation of New York children, who grew up hearing Binder’s booming voice intone “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and children of all ages…welcome to the Big Apple Circus!” every holiday season, there are only a few weeks left to hear the ultimate New York ringmaster one more time.
When my 16-year-old daughter Marina, who’s been a Big Apple Circus devotee since she was a toddler, heard the sad news, all other holiday entertainment bets were off, as far as she was concerned. “We have to see that show!” she insisted.
So on Saturday afternoon we walked past the showmen’s trailers in Damrosch Park, under the colorful posters and the strings of bare bulbs, toward the familiar blue tent covered with yellow stars.
Much to our surprise, Grandma the clown was standing out front to greet us, dressed in her trademark, ratty red coat and yellow stockings. Her grey hair was slightly messed up, as usual.
“Kids, come over hear and take a quick photo with Grandma!” a mother was shouting to her twins.
“I’d rather take a slow photo,” said Grandma.
It was the first time in more than 20 years of observing Grandma that I’d ever heard her speak. But she talked exactly the way I knew she would.
Clown Barry Lubin first created the character of Grandma in 1973, based on his own grandmother and the many other little old ladies he’d watched walking along the boardwalk in Atlantic City when he was a kid. Over the years, Grandma has changed, developed and become ever more herself. She’s the quintessential New Yorker—sassy, eccentric and self-involved, oblivious to the world around her, but a shameless show-off.
Grandma typically wanders into the ring in the middle of another artist’s act, tossing pieces of popcorn into the air, then catching them in her mouth. Unaware that she’s stepped on anybody’s toes, she’s thrilled when the spotlight swivels suddenly towards her—happy to boggie to rock ‘n’ roll or do any other stunt required to keep the audience applauding her. She is invariably given the hook by an irate Paul Binder, who’s exasperated that the clueless old lady has interrupted his show again.
Of course it’s the silly—but very human and unthreatening—Grandma that the children in the audience usually love more than any other clown.
On Saturday, once Marina realized Grandma was willing to pose for pictures, our family had to have one as well. “She’s been a fan of yours since she was two,” I told the clown, as we posed for the camera.
“How old are you now, three?” Grandma asked Marina. Then, eyeing my daughter’s miniskirt, purple stockings and silver shoes, she complained, “You’ve out-dressed me! I think I saw you last month in the pages of Vogue!”
Vintage Grandma! We laughed, as we lined up to buy cotton candy and head into the tent.
Inside, the circus bandstand was illuminated with green and purple neon, giving the space a wonderfully honky-tonk but somehow mysterious look. Even the sawdust in the ring was bathed in lavender light.
We took our seats between a Hungarian couple and a family with two little girls. Soon clowns tumbled into the ring, the circus band struck up a jazzy tune, and Paul Binder strode into the spotlight, top hat in hand. “If music be the food of life, play on!” he commanded. And the performers did.
Acrobats turned handsprings forwards and backwards. Clowns marched around, banging on drums. Shimmering in pale blue sequins, Regina Dobrovitskaya flew high above our heads, like a heavenly bird, doing upside down splits and swinging by her hands, then her feet and knees, flipping from one level to another on her tiered trapeze.
It was all live, happening in real time. And suddenly we saw her lose her grip and we gasped as she started to fall. But she was caught by her safety cord and slid gracefully to the ground, to start her routine again.
“She’s so brave!” murmured Marina, her eyes fixed on the steely little figure mounting the ropes once more.
Each act seemed more wonderful than the one before…the lyrical blond jugglers in their suits of midnight blue…the flexible tightrope contortionist, who seemed to turn herself inside-out… the funny dog trainer who was forever falling down… and the fierce Cossack riders who dared death with every move.
“How do they do that?” the six-year-old boy behind us would ask his father, at the climax of every act. But the man was much too absorbed to answer. The secret of the circus, of course, is that it enchants grownups as much as children.
The last act topped them all. The Flying Cortes family, in blue and white stripes, ascended to the top of the tent, where Alexander did heart-stopping double and triple somersaults, caught by the unerring hands of his brother. At the end, the four aerialists jumped—one by one—into the net, then bounced high into the air again like magical creatures before flipping down into the ring.
“Bravo!” we shouted at the top of our lungs, “Bravo!” And the whole audience applauded like there was no tomorrow—because this was live theater, and the artists needed to know that we were with them. Then the whole Big Apple troupe marched into the ring for the grand finale, and they danced in circles, while the audience clapped in rhythm. When the troupe took their final bows, Paul Binder, top hat in hand, humbly bowed with them.
We knew it was the last time we’d ever see him in red coattails, bowing with the Big Apple Circus. But more than that, we knew it marked the last Big Apple season under its founder’s direction—the end of a circus era.
Will the Big Apple survive and flourish without Binder’s booming voice, his red coat, and his day-to-day vision and management? Our family will be sitting on the edges of our seats, waiting to see. Grandma, for one, will be there next year—sharing the laughs with Bello Nock, the famous and brilliant clown-acrobat with the tower of straight, red hair.
“I’ll be back… God willing,” Grandma assured us, adjusting her funky red coat and straightening her earmuffs like a real New York bubba.
And so will we. A circus needs more than the talent of its artists to survive—it needs a devoted audience. Yes, we’ll be back, sitting in the blue tent again, because—as any trouper can tell you, “The show must go on.”
Mona Molarsky
NY City Life Examiner
http://www.examiner.com/x-907-NY-City-Life-Examiner
Examiner.com
