Big Apple Circus

We try to hit the Big Apple Circus as often as we can, because its the big local show, its a non-profit that does good work in the community, and it employs great circus acts from around the world. Ringling has always felt too big and impersonal - and I can only take Cirque de Soleil's Espirantu-esque commentary so often.

This years show is a jam-packed two hours that nonetheless feels shorter. Consummate entertainer Eddie Cantor used to say, "Always leave 'em wanting more", and the Big Apple's directors take that advice to heart.


Highlights include a dog act we always look forward to - a little short this year - that finds its actors by rescuing strays at animal shelters (bravo, Big Apple). The act includes Russian cradle aerialist Regina Dobrovitskaya, who in her other turn has nothing but a bolt of purple cloth protecting her from a drop of more than seven stories, and she wows the audience. The Long Twins - contortionists from China - somehow wriggle in and out of tin tubes no wider than a small dinner plate; what they do looks horrendously painful, but they also make it look easy.

Other standouts include the Curatola Brothers (acrobats from Italy), the Aniskin Troupe (a Trapeze family from Russia) and Picasso, Jr. (an AMAZING ping-pong ball and plate juggler from Spain). The rest of Big Apple performers hit the same high-degree of professionalism and polish that just throws you back in your seat and amazes you. Ringmaster Kevin Venardos - whose father and sister I know very well - makes a great successor to founder/ringmaster Paul Binder, and I hope he stays with them for a long time.



Final note - Barry Lubin as Grandma the Clown is just wonderful, as always, and the star of the show is Bello Nock. Bello was called "America's favorite clown" by Ringling for the years he was with them, but he's not a clown so much as a one-man circus. He never gets too obtrusive, but he can do it all, from playing the fluegel horn, to trapeze, to bungee, to trampoline, to a ridiculously scary daredevil act involving two rotating circles - Wheel of Steel - that reach fifty feat up into the big top - he and his partner run inside the circles, outside the circles (!) and fly off them (!!!) weightless into the air up at the top of the tent. Frightening. Seventh generation member of an old Swiss-Italian circus family, Bello's 13-year-old daughter has joined the troupe this year. It almost sounds like one of those circus stories you hear when you're a kid; "But doc, I AM Grimaldi"!

I always loved circuses, there's something miraculous and mysterious about them, and I always feel like I'm being allowed to see something rare, being let in on a world that's a little bit removed from the rest of us.

So go - you'll get in the holiday spirit because you'll feel like a kid within two minutes of the band starting the opening march.