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When the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus—back after a six-year absence—begins its 50-city tour of North America this September, it will include 75 highly trained performers and a litany of extravagant acts. Tightrope walkers will flit across a triangular rope, 30 feet in the air. Acrobats will launch themselves between four spinning wheels suspended from stadium ceilings. BMX bikers will spring off a giant trampoline. And a 360-degree set studded with massive video screens and enhanced with sonic spatial technology will envelop audiences in the spectacle.
There won’t, however, be any lions, tigers, or bears. Oh my!
“When you have a brand called ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ you can’t downscale,” says Juliette Feld Grossman, chief operating officer at Feld Entertainment, which acquired the iconic circus in 1984. “You really have to reimagine and reinvent.”
Founded in 1871, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus delighted American families with its traveling circus acts for nearly 150 years. The proverbial big top came down, however, at the end of 2017, with the company burdened by high operating costs and long-standing conflicts with animal rights activists.
Now, Feld Entertainment—the family-owned entertainment giant behind live spectacles like Disney on Ice and Monster Jam—is launching a completely new act, looking to modernize the Ringling franchise with a humans-only cast. Tickets recently went on sale for the North America tour, which begins in Bossier City, Louisiana on September 29.
Feld Entertainment has a track record for turning entertainment franchises into lucrative extravaganzas. Disney on Ice, which Feld has produced since the 1980s (when it was then known as Disney’s World on Ice), sold a record-breaking 250,000 tickets on the first day of the blockbuster Frozen-themed show in 2014. Feld acquired Live Nation’s Monster Jam motor-sports division in 2008, and has since grown the franchise to cover five continents and televised shows. Feld also produces the ongoing Jurassic World Live Tour and Sesame Street Live.
Feld, however, struggled to find a footing for Ringling Bros. in the years before its closure. CEO Kenneth Feld told Forbes in 2016 that Ringling’s annual audience hovered around 10 million people; the magazine estimated the actual mark was about half that. Before Ringling closed in the mid 2010s, some experts estimated that overall circus attendance had dropped as much as 50% in the past 20 years, outcompeted by the entertainment potential of smartphones and television. Meanwhile, Ringling was operating what Juliette Feld describes as a “a town without a ZIP code,” moving upwards of 500 people and miles of freight trains to each tour location. Disney on Ice, by comparison, can transport its entire production in about 12 semi-trucks.
Flagging sales and costly logistics were compounded by decades of criticism from animal rights groups, which alleged that the involvement of lions, tigers, and elephants in the circus amounted to mistreatment. Kelly Mollica, associate professor of business management at the University of Memphis, says that the very public back-and-forth litigation with animal rights groups took a toll on Ringling’s family-friendly reputation. In 2014, after a 14-year lawsuit, the ASPCA and other like organizations paid Ringling $16 million in settlements, which Feld at the time called a “public vindication” of the animal’s treatment.
But, as Mollica puts it, “even if [Ringling] never abused a single animal, the animal rights groups created this perception that they were doing so.”
Ringling announced in 2015 that it would phase out animal acts by 2018. Immediately, ticket sales slumped. Despite public sentiment against the use of animals, dancing tigers and trained elephants proved to be a driver of customer interest, according to Mollica. Animal acts turned out to be synonymous with the very idea of a circus.
Six years after the circus closed, the picture looks a little different for Ringling. Scott Davis, chief growth officer at the brand consulting firm Prophet, is optimistic about Ringling’s ability to evolve beyond these preconceptions. “It’s totally fair game and open game to redefine the frame of reference of what the circus is,” he says.
He sees a prime opportunity for Ringling to fill a void in the entertainment industry for an experience that appeals to people across generations—one that’s less conceptually abstract than Cirque du Soleil, but more mature than Disney on Ice.
Davis pointed to other legacy franchises, especially ones from Disney, Marvel, and Lego, that have managed to meet current market trends without forfeiting their core identity. “You’re seeing resilience, you’re seeing reimagination, and you’re seeing this notion of rethinking what relevance means to a modern generation,” he says.
To reinvent Ringling for the 21st century, Feld brought in British creative duo Dan Shipton and Ross Nicholson. The two plan to inject what Nicholson calls a “pop sensibility” into the circus, drawing on their extensive experience directing shows for megastars like Dua Lipa and Elton John. “Our background in creating shows for pop stars helped us in terms of recontextualizing and modernizing the approach to the circus and how we tell that story,” Nicholson says. “We’ve had to cultivate our approach to what an audience in 2023 wants,”
It’s certainly not 1871 anymore: Ringling is re-entering a world in which live performances increasingly incorporate virtual and augmented reality. Recent industry successes such as Megan Thee Stallion’s “Enter Thee Hottieverse” VR concert and the holographic ABBA Voyage residency have set new standards for spectacle.
But Ringling is betting on reality. “Shows are going towards this mind-blurring technology,” Shipton says. “We don’t need technology to allow a performer to appear like they’re flying from one end of the room to the other. They actually can do that.”
Production design for the reinvented circus includes a 360-degree arena set that the directors described as an “ultimate playground” for a multifaceted cast of athletes and performers. The acts will be supported by video screens integrated into the physical sets, as well as a cutting-edge sound and light system. The technical production gives the creative team flexibility to “go big or really hone it,” as Shipton puts it.
The new circus will also be more story-driven than previous iterations, structured around eight characters who will drive its narrative arc. Feld Entertainment has cast a musical theater entertainer, Lauren Irving, in the lead role, pointing to a substantial musical element at work within the show.
Shipton explained that leaning into narrative provides other avenues through which audience members can engage with the circus, beyond pure spectacle. “Story equals emotional connection,” he says.
Perhaps the biggest asset that Ringling Bros. has is its legacy. “There was nowhere else you could see that kind danger and excitement. It had the ability to make kids and adults and their grandparents all laugh at the same time,” says Davis from the consultancy Prophet. “It was a lot of joy.”
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