AP News, October 25th, 2007
It's muggy under the great tent of the "Big Apple Circus," now celebrating its 30th year, and your view may depend on the height of the person sitting in front of you, or even two rows in front.
But you need only bring some bottled water to Lincoln Center and a willingness to lean to your left or your right; the Big Apple is essential, old-fashioned circus, like the one you remember when you were a child, or as you'd like your own children to remember.
For this two-hour performance, plus a 15-minute intermission, the ringmasters are the mustachioed Paul Binder and the lovely Carrie Harvey, the cast an international shuffle of dancers and jugglers and tumblers. The crashers include the impudent "Grandma" clown, littering and cutting in line like a true New Yorker, and the sobbing, squished-faced Fumagilli, his hair sticking up like tail fins on a Cadillac.
Favorite acts depend on your taste, for the circus is a primer on how to put on a circus: prancing horses, adorable poodles, jumbo jump ropes, seltzer in the face, popcorn on a bald man's head, a high-wire artist laying back as if snuggled in a hammock, a show girl gyrating so many silver hula hoops she could be trapped inside a giant Slinky toy.
And for the topper of toppers, the catapult — catapulting acrobats, catapulting acrobats on pogo sticks, catapulting acrobats on stilts, catapulting acrobats on stilts launched into a chair so high you can see it from anywhere in the house.
Produced by Binder, directed by Michel Barette, and written by Barette and Michael Christensen, the "Big Apple Circus" runs in New York through Jan. 13, 2008, then packs up for Atlanta.
