Essay | The ‘Happy Dream’ of Running a Circus

When people ask me what I do for a living, and I tell them I run a circus, I’m usually met with an eye-roll and some quip like, “Yeah, so do I…” And then there’s an amusing moment when I insist, “No, I’m the actual CEO of the Big Apple Circus.”

There’s no denying that this is a tricky time to be running a circus. We live in the age of TikTok, in which everyone seems to have two-second attention spans and all sorts of streaming services in their pockets and at home on their televisions. At times it feels like a struggle to get anyone out to see something that can seem as old-timey as the circus. The last few years have not been kind to the American circus industry. In the period after the financial crisis, Big Apple’s board made valiant efforts to keep the circus afloat, but in 2016, it declared bankruptcy. This was followed by the discontinuation of The Greatest Show on Earth in 2017 and Cirque du Soleil’s bankruptcy in 2020. Covid put the kibosh on everything.