RBBB in Brooklyn #1 (From KLSDAD)

Opening night (Mar 20 - 2013) Ringling Red - New York City – Brooklyn - Barclays Center FOR decades the ritual blooming of circus cotton candy each March has been a sure sign of spring for winter-weary New Yorkers. Until three years ago. That’s when the nearly billion-dollar renovation of Madison Square Garden dislodged the annual Manhattan run of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the “Greatest Show on Earth,” temporarily evicting human and animal performers from their subterranean berths. Although the circus toured arenas in New Jersey and on Long Island, city circus lovers were denied their yearly infusion of hokum, bunkum, hoopla, humbug and ballyhoo at the New York opening — long considered the opening, the Broadway of the circus. Enter Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the borough that was the birthplace of P. T. Barnum’s circus. On Wednesday Big Bertha, as circus folk call Ringling, opened its new show there for a 23-performance run that will continue to April 1. The advent of the circus at Barclays “will take our audience to a completely new place,” said Bruce C. Ratner, the arena’s developer, “and will be an important part of our audience mix, since we want all kinds of events for people of many different interests.” So it was that on Monday and Tuesday the vagabond city that is the circus arrived at Barclays, and a crew of 85 began the intricate load-in. The 22-hour operation disgorged 77 circus train cars full of equipment, props and costumes, as well as 21 horses, 20 ferrets, 18 tigers, 16 black and white poodles, 7 Flemish giant rabbits, 2 snakes, a donkey and, of course, those lords of the ring, 8 elephants. Not to mention 110 performing humans, including 13 clowns. “It’s like moving a small town from city to city, and then you put on a show,” said Mike Stuart, the 42-year-old director of operations. While Brooklyn may now be the It borough for cuisine and the arts, its circus tradition extends back more than a century. Barnum first staged his circus in Brooklyn — then an independent city — in 1871, because he had leased the use of his name in New York City to a museum operator, according to Matthew Wittmann, a historian who organized the recent “Circus and the City” exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center. Barnum’s Brooklyn circus — an ancestor of the Barclays Ringling Brothers show — then went on tour, and soon the impresario bought back the right to use his name in New York. In 1884 he paraded 21 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, an immense sensation, and for many decades Brooklyn was a circus fixture, Dr. Wittmann said. A typical pattern, he added, was to open at Madison Square Garden for four to six weeks, “and then go to Brooklyn to play under canvas before heading out on a larger national tour.” This made the debut at Barclays, which opened last year, something of a homecoming — the first time the full Ringling Brothers circus performed in Brooklyn since May 14, 1938, Dr. Wittmann said, although it briefly established a feisty one-ring tent show in Coney Island in 2009 and ’10. It is coincidence that the new show’s theme is about the building of a circus — the elephants wear hard hats, clowns wield gargantuan wrenches. As if in a nod to its new arena, it is titled “Built to Amaze!” Mr. Ratner said it was “appropriate” for a show about the building of the circus to inhabit Barclays, which for much of a decade was a contentious neighborhood construction saga that involved, in addition to discord over the arena itself, yearslong reconstructions of a subway entrance and the underground Atlantic Avenue railroad tracks. Mr. Ratner also said that the circus and “Disney on Ice,” both owned by Feld Entertainment, were important enough bookings “for us to customize the arena for them.” Mr. Stuart of Ringling Brothers dissected the Barclays blueprints and visited the construction site three years ago to offer some requirements. As a result the performance-level corridors were made wider and higher to accommodate the elephants, the arena floor was redesigned to provide moorings for the show’s 70,000-pound steel aerial lighting truss, the power system was reconfigured for the circus grid, and the spotlight platforms were relocated. As it is for arenas around the country, Ringling Brothers is important to the Barclays balance sheet, its image and its rate of occupancy. Barclays has agreed to an expensive five-year contract with Feld because the company’s shows are arena ornaments. “Our arena has been very much about basketball,” Mr. Ratner said, “but only 30 percent of those in Brooklyn have a keen interest in the sport.” Nicole Feld, who, with her sister Alana, produces the Ringling Brothers show, said that circus customers are “a rich mix,” with potential to expand Barclays’ marketing efforts beyond the arena’s base of sports and concert fans. Ringling executives said they hoped the Garden’s construction schedule would permit a return to Manhattan next year, something Mr. Ratner did not seem concerned about. “There is a huge circus audience for both arenas,” Mr. Ratner said. “Brooklyn’s population is larger than Manhattan’s, and a lot of people who come here ordinarily wouldn’t travel to the circus in Manhattan.” As for the circus performers and crew, Nicole Feld acknowledged that doing the show in Brooklyn came with logistical challenges. For one thing, the mile-long circus train cannot park next to Barclays, so everything must be trucked in from a railroad siding in Secaucus, N.J. And instead of rolling out of their circus-train bunks and strolling into the arena — a transportation proximity that many arenas make possible — the performers are being bused to Brooklyn from the train in Secaucus. “We got stuck in traffic, but hopefully that’s unusual in New York,” said Flavia Alves, a Brazilian dancer and solo aerialist in the show, who said she is new to the city. And the show’s eight elephants? For them it was an excellent adventure just to arrive at the new arena, although they did not walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, Barnum style. They were driven in three trucks, accompanied by their handlers, from the Nassau Coliseum, where they had finished their previous run. Once at Barclays the elephants traveled down to the performance level not by plodding on ramps, as is their custom, but by riding in the building’s mammoth 80-foot-long elevators — a first for the show’s elephants, according to Mr. Stuart. Emerging from the elevators the elephants crossed a huge turntable — akin to a locomotive roundhouse — on the way to their new stalls. “They were very cautious,” said Brian French, a seventh-generation circus man who is the show’s elephant manager. Mr. French said that some of the eight — all females (circus folk call them “girls”) — are in their late 50s and have been in more than 100 arenas, some of which no longer exist. “Their memories are so phenomenal that they remember the layouts of every one of them,” he said. “But Barclays is all new, and they were nervous.” So they sniffed everything with their trunks. They stepped cautiously. They adjusted to new sights, sounds and activity. And after a few minutes, ruminantly munching hay, they became settled new Brooklyn residents.