Red Show Review (From Brandon Sterk)

!cid_image001_jpg@01CCA611, a photo by bucklesw1 on Flickr. Hi Buckles, This is Brandon from Chicago chiming in with a review of Ringling Red’s “Fully Charged” for you excellent blog. We took our kids on our annual pilgrimage to the United Center for the Feld Family’s latest offering. While I have toggled between liking and disliking the newer format of the Ringling shows, for me Fully Charged was Giant step backward. I actually really enjoyed last year’s blue show—“Barnum’s Funundrum” and had high hopes for this year’s show but it just never seemed to get off the ground. Even though Ringling seems to be all about “theming” these days, there really wasn’t a discernible theme to the show and it just sort of plodded along rolling about rebranded acts from the last 5-6 years. I think what is glaringly missing too is the lack of any real star power—for years you had Gunther, then David Larible, then Bello, but since Bello there’s just been no one for people to get excited about seeing. To be fair, the 2nd half was much better than the first, but it just wasn’t enough to save this show. Interestingly, one of the more hyped acts on this year’s show—2 brothers of considerable girth (their name escapes me)—performing hand balancing and such were missing from the show and their bio has been removed from the Ringling’s website—this could explain why their futile attempt at a spec titled “Think Big” seemed to be missing something. The one bright spot for me was Taba—their trainer who now presents horses, elephants (8 or 9 I think) and tigers (perhaps they’re trying to turn him into a modern day Gunther?) who is now on his 5th tour(?). I cant be sure but it looked like he was working with almost 15 cats which seems like a lot for this day in age of Ringling Brothers. Well hopefully the new Blue Show “Dragons” going into rehearsal in a few weeks will build on what the Blue show did last time around… from early pictures posted online from Nicole Feld it looks like it will feature a new Globe act that features some type of Clear glass globe instead of the black steel cage… we’ll see in about 2 months…