After reading Water for Elephants last summer, I was all fired up to go to Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey when the show came to town in August. It was nothing like what it used to be, not only when I was a kid but even when my children were small. This was mainly dance, down on the floor, with few aerial acts—not much high wire and trapeze—and relatively little spectacle at all. Instead they had a stupid theme that they were trying to pursue in Cirque do Soleil fashion, but it came off lame, simple-minded, and obscure.
They relied on video images cast on the floor for a lot of effects instead of using real objects to interact with. You might as well have been watching TV, and you would have had a better view.
It was also set up so that stuff in the middle blocked your view. It was always a three-ring event, but it didn’t used to be set up so that less than half the audience could see the main attractions. During the animal act, the big cats were all at the other end, with some kind of structure in the middle, and at our end were just the little dogs. I wanted to see the lions and tigers. Even the parade seemed small and limited. I was disappointed and wouldn’t bother to go again.