All photos Copyright Debbie Grossmann 2004 for Cirque Boom. Not for use without written permission. _______________________________________________________________________

Check out what the press said about The Hoffmann Circus:
WNYC , The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Eagle, The New Yorker, Operanotes.com

Get to know the artists of The Hoffmann Circus

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PRESS RELEASE:

DUMBO, Brooklyn, April 29-May 20, 2004: Cirque Boom Circus Theater takes on eyeball mechanics, doll-girls gone haywire and stolen reflections in The Hoffmann Circus, its new circus-opera adaptation of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann featuring opera singers, aerialists and physical theater. The production opened on April 29th at the UnderWater Theatre—the lower level of DUMBO’s Water Street Restaurant & Lounge, at 66 Water St between Dock and Main Streets (F train to York; A to High; 2/3 to Clark). Performances will run through May 20 (details on days & times at www.smarttix.com.) Tickets are $12 + 2-drink minimum.

Like The Tales of Hoffmann, The Hoffmann Circus is a boisterous ride through a recurring nightmare, replete with surreal settings, bizarre characters and fantastical plots—as well as gorgeous music, high-stakes melodrama, hilarious clowning and aerial dance on harness, marine net and fabric. Hoffmann, a lovelorn raconteur, regales his bar buddies with tales of his lost loves. Each tale is a world unto itself, transporting Hoffmann into a mad scientist’s lair, a violinmaker’s living room and a courtesan’s boudoir. Hoffmann falls madly in love with each world’s resident heroine: the quiet Olympia, so perfect she turns out to be nothing but a singing doll; the docile Antonia, protected from her wild nature by her eccentric father; and the flamboyant Giulietta, whose bold sexual advances are orchestrated by the Devil himself. At the end of the evening, Hoffmann drunkenly descends from his romantic roller coaster ride and proclaims his love for Nicklausse—his homely clown girl sidekick whose affections for him have gone unheeded—for a brief instant before plunging into deep inebriation.

The Tales of Hoffmann is a star of the Western Opera Canon, but it’s also a dark opera with a confused history. Offenbach died three months before it opened, leaving other composers to finish the score and causing 123 years of arguments among musicologists and opera fans as to the order of the acts, the correct version of the music, and the composer’s equivocal intentions.

Cirque Boom takes advantage of this controversy by offering its own adaptation of the Tales of Hoffmann— a 90 minute English version set in an actual tavern with brick walls, old steel columns and a cash bar. In The Hoffmann Circus, sopranos, baritones and a heroic tenor sing among the audience, and the lounge piano player in the corner accompanies the production with verve and style. The lounge seating area opens up into the cavernous performance space where Hoffmann’s stories unfold, brought to life through aerial dance and physical theater. Nicklausse, the clown, doesn’t quite fit in anywhere—she witnesses each of Hoffmann’s conquests and searches for ways to become the ideal woman he seems to be looking for.

Cirque Boom, based in Brooklyn, makes content-driven circus theater: circus that matters and theater that amazes. In 2003, Cirque Boom presented The Circus of Vices and Virtues at the Brooklyn Lyceum, which was hailed by critics as “a unique fusion of real ideas and big-top spectacle” and “circus unlike [audiences] have seen before.” For The Hoffmann Circus, Cirque Boom has assembled a sonorous quintet of opera singers including David Gordon as Hoffman, as well as a dynamo team of talented aerialists, acrobats and jugglers, including the hilarious clown Anna Zastrow as Nicklausse. The Hoffmann Circus is directed by Ruth Juliet Wikler.

The Hoffmann Circus wass made possible by The Alan B. Slifka Foundation, the Philip S. Harper Foundation, and Puffin Foundation Ltd. It is part of the Cirque Boom Launch Pad Series, a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).