One of my favourite things when I was growing up was the circus. Another one of my favourites was pirates. Not the Somalian oil tanker hijacking variety, mind you, but rather the swashbuckling Pirates of the Caribbean kind. Now take both of these and combine them and you get the fantastic show I saw last night.
I went to see The Pirate Experience, put on by Boswell Wilkie Circus at the Grand West Arena, with Claudia and Cole and we enjoyed it thouroughly. And trust me, it takes a lot to hold a 7 year old’s attention for almost 2 hours. It has everything you could ask for including a drunken sailor harassing the crowd, sword fights, a lake with actual water on stage, a huge ship and many supurb acrobatic and aerial acts.
It also had a story of sorts binding the whole show together, but that played second fiddle to the acts. There was never a moment when the action stopped and at times there was two or three different acts happening at once.
There was only one element missing from my youthful circus experiences and that was the tantalising smell
of sawdust and popcorn, which was more than made up for by the caliber of the performance.
I am very glad to see that the circus is able to reinvent itself in a time when I feared that it might become a relic of the past.
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