The new Ringling show, “Out of This World,” produced by Alana Feld, 36, will have its premiere on Thursday in Los Angeles. But it first stopped in this dusty Central Valley city for a test run. Would new elements — an ice floor, an elaborate narrative, a smartphone app — make audiences forget to miss the elephants? Or would the Greatest Show on Earth prove a little less grand without its prancing pachyderms?
The show, which requires 56 railroad cars to transport, incorporates technology in new ways. A free app has features like push notifications designed to engage the audience before the show and during intermission. Toy swords, telescopes and blasters sold in the arena aisles and corridors before show time change colors during the performance, based on the story line. (Everything turns green, for instance, when Queen Tatiana emerges.)
Sensors that create computerized spotlight effects are sewn into costumes, in particular those worn by stunt skaters from China, who zoom across the ice on stilts. “Nothing can replace the elephants,” Ms. Feld said. “This wasn’t about trying. This was about creating a new genre of circus, with acts seamlessly transitioning from floor to air to ice.”
And if anyone misses the elephants, which first joined the circus in 1882 when P. T. Barnum added one named Jumbo to his lineup, there is always the concession stand. Feld sells $16 snow cones in plastic cups shaped like elephants. They sit on yellow, red and blue drums with their trunks and front feet held gamely in the air. The hinged head tilts back to reveal pineapple, cherry and raspberry-flavored ice.
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