The Greatest Show on Earth?

Not.

I was excited when I heard the Ringling Brothers were in Trenton yesterday. Natalie had a fabulous time when we took her (thanks to Beth and Kevin) to the Big Apple Circus around Xmas year before last. I thought, Ringling Brothers, this is the big time. Wrong.

Unlike the Big Apple, Ringling has no live band, just some piped in pseudofunk. It has more exotic animals, but fewer interesting tricks. One clown was a good acrobat, but there was nobody with any real comic talent. Everywhere there were racist, imperialist overtones, troops of (good) Chinese acrobats and "Mongolian Pole vaulters" and scores of cheap talentless bimbos in pseudo-Arabian garb. Mostly, Ringling tries to make up for the enormous size of its undertalented cast by pandering to the crowd with lame audience participation bits ("Everybody say ho! Ho!"). Like minor league baseball. As with reality shows, it's cheaper to have the audience be the show than to actually develop content.

Concessions were a really sad spectical, selling so much cheap junk at a circus in a poor neighborhood.

Big Apple is totally worth seeing, with a lot of Russian trained performers. Ringling is crap.

Luckily, the kids had a good time. Although Graham may have been more into the bus we saw when we were ranging outside at intermission. It was a really cool bus.