Uncle Soapy doing exactly what it was that Uncle Soapy did best.
Magical. Classic.
Bob Hunt is the whiteface about to pass behind him on the unicycle.
This is what my favorite Ringling clowning will always look like to me: clowns on the track, before the show, during the show, during the intermission... clowns on the track.
Slaps, falls, juggling, explosions, 108s... all on the track.
Now the rings are gone, the track is gone, the wigs, noses, shoes, props, the Clown College... a lot has changed in the last 10 years.
It's now supposedly "hipper", "edgier" and market research has molded it into something "more in step with today's audience". That may or may not be but it's very unlikely at this point that it will ever be this timeless, simple and purely joyful again.
4 comments:
"market research", that's Madison Avenue for, "shoving it down our throat whether we like it or not"!!!!
Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, DaVinci, Monet, Picasso, --- all had one thing in common --- they didn't do Market Reasearch! Thank God!
i agree,i remember at age 8 i believe when they used to perform at the smaller arenas here in chicago before the big one's,and i specifically rememeber one track gag, it was a clown in a giant apple costume and using a worm puppet as a gag and it made me cry thats what i remember and thats why im a clown today.and what happen to all those great gags?
The glory days of Ringling are in the past for now but these kind of things can't go on forever and their will come a day , very soon perhaps , when those circus loving people will get tired of paying those ridiculousely high prices to sit and watch the rotting carcas of a once proud and spectacular show and they'll just stop going. But until that day comes nothing will change. Corporate as corporate does.
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