Barbara Zuck Reviews "Dr. Danga Grimaldi's Exhibition Fantastique"

REVIEW COLUMBUS FRINGE FESTIVAL

‘Circus’ delights despite shoestring budget
Friday, May 26, 2006

By Barbara Zuck - the Columbus Dispatch

This "circus" has no ring. No elephants. No lions, tigers or bears.

And the clowns? Very bargain basement.

Nevertheless, the Dr. Danga Grimaldi Circus’ Exhibition Fantastique, which opened last night at Columbus Dance Theatre as part of this year’s Columbus Fringe Festival, is still lovable.

You have to love the ridiculously small puppets and marionettes, which take the place of live animals and other circus-performer staples, like the strong man.

Texas Red, the performing chicken, is particularly endearing — not to mention agile.

You have to love the stilt walker (Dave Bowling) who does everything from change the lighting and handle the taped music from on high to sing (badly).

You have to love Ukulele Man (Tom Harker) who handles props (badly) and sings (really well).

And, of course, you have to love the stars of the show, Kristina Isabelle, Eoin O’Brien and Meghan O’Brien.

This trio of talented and versatile performers has a wealth of knowledge of circus acts, burlesque and dance history, and they keep the bulk of the show interesting, funny and sometimes amazing.

Isabelle spoofs icons of dance history in her latter-day variations of the fan dance and other spicy numbers society once thought risque. Bangin’ Betty Boom is her imaginative — and challenging — take on striptease. She pops balloons strategically attached to her body — while dancing on stilts. (She wears a body suit; this festival isn’t that fringe.)

Meghan O’Brien follows suit with a clever, ’60s-look dance with lighted hoola Hula Hoops, the kind of number that used to be done with flaming batons.

Isabelle and Eoin O’Brien’s trapeze act has progressed since the first time I saw it. More polished, more daring, more poses.

Their comic bits, one involving nine beautiful boxes and another that’s a bad take-off on escape artists, begin to try one’s patience. Although not as much as Lester E. Booth, the "recently discovered" cowboy poet. Lester might have a life on television, however, where the level of humor these days is even below a corny circus act.

The circus traditionally has struck romantic chords with audiences. It can come at you from so many directions.

It’s entertainment. It’s beauty. It’s humor. It’s danger.

But, like all successful art forms, it depends on the performers carrying the audience away from themselves, from their problems, from reality. And it depends on performers who can dazzle by their being able to do things the rest of us cannot. That’s the "awe factor" — the same ingredient that made Paganini a mesmerizing violinist, Baryshnikov a dazzling dancer, Muhammad Ali the world’s most famous sports figure.

They all were larger than life.

The Grimaldi Circus offers those moments, even when it’s offering satire. It just still has too many times when the reality of a shoestring operation interferes.

bzuck@dispatch.com