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Step right up: Big tops pitch their tents in mall parking lots

By Nancy Cohen

Barnum’s Kaleidoscape made its debut next to Century City Shopping Center in Los Angeles.

Hip hip hooray! The circus is coming — to the suburban mall.

While circuses still come to town, a variety of big-top operators have in recent years pitched their tents in mall parking lots, both in the United States and overseas.

“The environment that some of the malls offer, and the customers that they’re trying to attract, are some of the same targeted by Kaleidoscape,’’ said Scott Smith, vice president of Barnum’s Kaleidoscape, a production of Ringling Bros.

“Customers want to go to some place that’s safe, and easy to get to.’’

The show has visited Mall of America, among other shopping center venues, and is headed for King of Prussia (Pa.) Mall in the fall.

Circuses need enough room to pitch their tents and park their long caravans of trucks, trailers and animal transports, and that kind of space is increasingly scarce with the continuing development of the suburbs.

The Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. circus turned up at the Danbury Fair Mall last year with 70 trailer trucks, 43 recreational vehicles and mobile homes, and even a special long truck carrying what the circus bills as “the world’s largest cannon,’’ according to an Associated Press report. It was a fitting location, given that the mall, as its name suggests, occupies the site of a once-famous Connecticut fairground.

Barnum’s Kaleidoscape is a one-ring show, smaller than the traditional circus, and needs an approximately 60,000-square-foot footprint for its tent and trailers. It fit nicely into the employee parking area at the 1.6 million-square-foot Valley View Center in Dallas for five weeks in February and March of this year, according to Darla Parker, regional marketing director for The Macerich Co., Santa Monica, Calif., which owns the mall.

Kaleidoscape, which bills itself as an upscale act distinctly different from the traditional circus, made its debut last year next to the Century City Shopping Center in Los Angeles and was the first Ringling Bros. event to be held under canvas since 1956. Instead of seating its audience on hard wooden benches, Kaleidoscape provides plush red velvet seats, ringside boxes and even couches, and as such, could be seen as the circus equivalent of an upscale mall. Its concession stands sell pasta and espresso, veggie wraps, margaritas and gourmet chocolate bars, and even the bathrooms are something one would associate with a very smart department store rather than a circus.

There is no sawdust, no “lai-dees and gen-tle-men’’ drum roll hyperbole from the ringmaster, no bare-chested fire-eaters or custard-pie-throwing clowns.

“It’s very elegant; it’s not the clowns with big baggy pants and the big shoes with the red nose that junior squeezes,’’ Smith said.

Audiences should not expect to see parading elephants, snarling tigers jumping through rings of fire or chimps riding bicycles. “We have a few horses, and a few geese,’’ Smith said, but the emphasis is on human performers.

“It’s a three-hour journey into a different world,’’ Smith said. “You’re really escaping to a different place.’’

“We were most impressed with what Kaleidoscape brought to the table in terms of top-notch everything,’’ Macerich’s Parker said.

Circuses can create a lot of positive publicity for a mall, noted Stanley L. Eichelbaum, SCMD, president of Marketing Developments, Cincinnati, a retail and entertainment consulting company. They are also one more example of how mall owners can use otherwise fallow space to generate money.

Smith was vague about the terms on which his circus visits malls; sometimes the circus pays the mall, sometimes the mall pays, he said. Macerich’s Parker declined to specify who had paid whom. But either way, a circus at the mall can be beneficial to both.

Kaleidoscape’s visit to Valley View Center came at an ideal time, Parker said. Not only was there space in the parking lot, but the circus helped boost visitors during a post-holiday period that traditionally is quiet at malls.

The circus that visits Danbury Fair Mall for two days each June provides lots of cross-marketing opportunities, said Elizabeth Platt, the mall’s marketing manager.

When the circus arrives, jugglers perform in the food court during lunchtime, and the circus also holds an elephant race in the parking lot to raise money for charity. And to encourage circus-goers to shop, each is given a book of coupons.

Inevitably, not all the attention a mall receives when the circus comes to town is desirable, from the operator’s point of view: Animal rights activists these days show up at nearly every venue. But Danbury Fair Mall has more than a little experience dealing with them already: Demonstrators recently protested a fur sale at Macy’s, Platt said.

When the show is over, the circus does a good job cleaning up, she said.

“I haven’t had any problem with the circus being on the property,’’ Platt reported. “They do drill holes to stake the tents, but they also have them filled by any company that we recommend the morning after.’’