The Big Apple Circus—Step Right Up!
June 29-July 4 in the Sports Haven parking lot, Long Wharf Dr., New Haven. (203) 562-5666, bigapplecircus.com.

For a lot of Easterners, the only circuses they know are overwhelming, stadium-sized, multi-ring traveling behemoths like Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey. For those who, as I did, grew up in small towns in midwestern states, the circus was more likely to be a single-tent affair, perhaps with a freakish sideshow attached. (I personally never witnessed a geek, pinhead or some of the other carnival attractions of yore, but I am well acquainted with the two-headed calf. In Connecticut especially, the classic travelling tented circus has been scarce for decades due to the lasting terrors of the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944.)

What makes the Big Apple Circus so attractive is that it combines the best elements of those grand-scale events (their elegant and precise design elements, focused and practiced performers) with the intimacy of those big tops (the smell of sawdust, up-close magical effects, interaction with the clowns).

The circus arrived in New Haven last year amid considerable fanfare. It was a special thrill to have a circus in town during a lively holiday like July 4, and the excitement hasn't diminished in the year since. Last year's show had a Hollywood theme, with the Big Apple's iconic Grandma clown character dolled up like a Jedi, Bogart and other cinematic characters (all of which were unfamiliar to my two young daughters, but which they enjoyed nonetheless on their own fantasy terms). Acts included a small dog who appeared to talk, a stunt all the more impressive due to it being performed so close to the audience. If you are in the front rows the net that catches the plummeting acrobats is directly over your head.

This year's show is Step Right Up!, which reminisces about seaside music hall entertainment of the early 20th century. This is a more conventional circus theme than last year's movie-mad revue. But the theme is largely irrelevant, as the framework at the Big Apple Circus is established before you even walk in the door. That essential frame is a canvas tent where you don't expect to see one, emitting glorious oompah music, hoots and cheers.

God is a DJ
By Falk Richter, translated by Yuval Sharon. Through June 30 at the Summer Cabaret at Yale, 217 Park St., New Haven. (203) 432-1567, summercabaret.org.

If you've read anything about the wordily intense God is a DJ by Falk Richter, which opens the provocative and progressive 2007 Summer Cabaret at Yale season, you know that it's about a young couple who have turned their living space into an ongoing performance art project. Given that premise, you probably think you know not only where this is likely to lead—to some climactic physical confrontation, witnessed by a live audience—but what the dramatic structure of the whole evening is likely to be.

So when I tell you that the two players—the pasty, peripatetic Carter Gill and the alternately energized and enervating Erica Sullivan—don't fully explain their art project until a third of the way through the show, that the inevitable climax is not physical but verbal, and that Richter retains an ability to shock with brutal images at regular intervals right up until the unexpected ending, you might well rethink those expectations.

Of course there are long periods of indulgence, long digressions on the fleeting value of modern fame, meditations on power and control, and an overall theme about how media has desensitized us. If you didn't expect that, you've never seen a post-modern play, including the Futurists in the 1920s and Beckett in the 1940s. There are absolutely cliched, over-the-top and beyond-endurance moments. But director Mike Donahue and several skilled designers have given this unexpectedly balanced and articulate piece the production it requires. If you can't stand it, it's because it doesn't want you to.

carnott@newhavenadvocate.com