After 146 Years, Ringling Brothers Circus Takes Its Final Bow Under the Big Top Sarah Maslin Nir and Nate Schweber - The New York Times
go to original May 22, 2017

Watch The Greatest Show On Earth take its final bow (Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus)

The lights went up on the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus on Sunday evening to reveal 14 lions and tigers sitting in a circle, surrounding a man in a sparkling suit. It was a sight too implausible to seem real yet such an iconic piece of Americana that it was impossible to believe the show would not go on.

After 146 years, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey is closing for good, responding to a prolonged slump in ticket sales that has rendered the business unsustainable, according to its operator, Feld Entertainment. On Sunday, the circus glittered, thundered and awed beneath the booms and klieg lights of Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum. That there was no tent over the final show, no striped eaves from which the daring young man on the flying trapeze could hang, felt fitting. The big top was packed up, this time forever.

This circus began in 1871 as P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome, and Feld bought it in 1967. After the removal of elephants from the performance last year after fierce and prolonged condemnation from animal rights groups, already-falling ticket sales dropped even further. The circus — with its 500-person crew, 100 animals and mile-long trains, which moved around the trapeze and its artists, the high wire and its tightrope walkers, the motorcycles and the daredevils — had become infeasible in an age in which video games and cellphone screens compete to provide childhood wonder.

When the ringmaster, Johnathan Lee Iverson, first saw the circus as a 9-year-old at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, he could have sworn that the spangled horses that galloped there were real unicorns. At 41, after nearly two decades with Ringling Brothers, he has an awe in his voice when he speaks of the place that suggests that his certainty endures.

The world is losing “a place of wonder,” he said at an event a few days before the final performances. All around him, performers with thick makeup and saddened faces spoke to reporters about the circus’s demise. “It’s the last safe space,” he said. “It’s the last pure form of entertainment there is.”

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