INTERVIEW: Circus Oz flies into the New Victory for some ‘Merry Mayhem’
Photo: Circus Oz performs Merry Mayhem through Sunday, Dec. 28, at the New Victory Theater. Photo courtesy of Alexis Buatti Ramos / Provided by Rubenstein with permission.
NEW YORK — The talented and hard-working members of Circus Oz have left their homes in Australia to travel all the way to New York City for a Christmas run of their latest show, Merry Mayhem, which continues at the New Victory Theater through Sunday, Dec. 28. The circus spectacle is a kid-friendly extravaganza featuring high-flying stunts, hilarious routines and a joyous dedication to wondrous entertainment.
This iteration of Circus Oz is a fairly new one. Although the company goes back decades in Australia, they recently restructured post-pandemic, reshaping into an organization that is artist-centered and a bit leaner in terms of overhead. At the center of the group are Nicci Wilks, director of Merry Mayhem, and Debra Batton, one of the performers. Joining Batton in the company are Claire Bindoff, Jarred Dewey, Sharon Gruenert, Spenser Grace Inwood, Leopold Pentland, Olivia Porter and Angelique Ross.
“We made this show in three weeks in 2023,” Wilks said in a recent phone interview. “We did one week of development, and then we had a break. And then we had two weeks of rehearsal, but we’re an unfunded company now. So our rehearsal time is a lot shorter. Usually we’d have 4-6 weeks of rehearsal, but these days, it’s now a lot smaller, which means we have to work very fast.”
One of the chief missions of Circus Oz is to reach as vast an audience as possible. That means Merry Mayhem plays well with the youngsters in the crowd at the New Victory, and it works also for the adults in the audience. As Wilks said, their target viewership are “children to great-grandparents.”
“We recently did a big outdoor show,” she said. “We did outdoors in Canberra in Australia, and it was free. And so we’d get like 3,000 people a day just coming along to watch the show, and they were literally from babies to great-grandparents, from a really vast multicultural background as well. We do try and make it appeal to everyone.”
There is great diversity on stage as well. Circus Oz celebrates each of its performers and ensures that everyone feels welcome. Wilks pointed out that Batton, one of the leaders of the company, is in her 60s and ready to catapult across the stage to the oohs and aahs of the audience.
“I think the company really, particularly now, has a focus on bringing new, younger people into the company, but also we have this thing of company membership where we really, like a family, try to hold onto the people that work in the show,” Wilks said. “It really is a big family. We have a company membership of nearly 100 members, and they are people that have worked with the company for some time and who we try to maintain a relationship with and stay connected to.”
Today’s Circus Oz, Wilks admitted, is much smaller than previous years. There are nine performers on stage as opposed to the 12 that was present before the pandemic. When the company is not performing, Batton and Wilks are employed one day per week for behind-the-scenes work.
“All of us are probably doing it for the love of the company and the love of the art,” she said. “I think what is wonderful now is that it really is an artist-led company right now, and I love that. I think that’s what the company wanted to keep was that we wanted to maintain an artist-led company and having artists on the board as well as outside people on the board.”
For every act on the New Victory stage, safety is key, and Wilks constantly stresses this fact when she’s directing the performers.
“I say to them every day before we go on stage here, ‘We just have to stay safe,'” she said. “Safety is a high priority, the biggest, but accidents do happen. That’s just a part of the circus life, I suppose, but everyone is very supportive of each other. We communicate a lot about our bodies, our minds, how everybody’s doing, and we talk about how we’ve only got two more shows until four days off. We just got to get there. People encourage each other. A few people are a little bit sick, me included, on this tour, so there’s that — trying to hold each other up and maintain safety first.”
Wilks said the company trains a lot, and the finale of the show, which features each of the performers sailing through the air in a trapeze act, is their focus during these rehearsals. They need to make sure every move is precise and practiced.
“That’s probably the thing that we train most regularly when we’re at home in Australia,” Wilks said. “But the other big thing about that is that it’s a big ensemble act, so that makes it equally harder in terms of coming together and training regularly. It’s very different to when you’re working on a solo act. As you can see, you rely on being caught by somebody else and being caught then at the other end by a lot of other people, so it is very much a big group number where you do need all the people there in terms of training. … Yeah, it’s a big one.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Merry Mayhem by Circus Oz, directed by Nicci Wilks, runs through Sunday, Dec. 28, at the New Victory Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
