Lord of The Rings

By Jane Van Tassel

As the houselights dim in the Garrett Coliseum in Montgomery, the ! ringmaster's voice rattles the rafters: "Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages! Producer Kenneth Feld proudly presents the 119th edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the Greatest Show on Earth! Take one! We're rolling! Lights! Camera! Action!" But wait -- what kind of show is this? Flickering lights in Ring 2 reveal a scene right out of a silent film. Two Keystone Kop cars have collided, while clowns dressed as cops and criminals strike up a dance.

"Hold it! Cut!" bellows the ringmaster. "That's not what I mean. We need the Greatest Show on Earth! Lights! Camera! Circus!" A bright spotlight shines on a bejeweled woman riding an Asian elephant, who leads a circus parade with all the trappings: clowns on unicycles, clowns on stilts, 20 women and 20 men dressed in antebellum costumes, more elephants, acrobats, a tableau wagon pulled by horses. The grandest entrance is saved for the platinum-haired animal trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams, who bounds into the arena astride a prancing white horse.

Welcome to the circus, 1990, and the world of Kenneth Feld, who is currently flying as high as one of his daring trapeze artists. The head of Irvin Feld and Kenneth Feld Productions, based in suburban Washington, he is the world's leading producer of live entertainment. Feld not only commands three traveling units of the Greatest Show on Earth, but he is also the creator of five touring Walt Disney's World on Ice spectacles and has just completed work on the new $20 million Siegfried & Roy magic show, which opened Feb. 1 in Las Vegas.

The Lord of the Rings, 41, oversees a family-owned empire that is expected to collect $250 million in revenues this year, double the level of four years ago. Last year his attractions were seen by an estimated 20 million people in Europe, South America and Asia, as well as 20 million in more than 150 cities in the U.S. Says Feld: "Our international circus and ice shows cross all cultural and political boundaries. You don't need to understand a specific language."

A Feld show is a mixture of world-class performances, a sensory overload of color and music, and roller-coaster pacing. Calculating that the attention span of the average child is about 8 1/2 minutes, he cuts most acts to their best eight. Feld's formula includes a dash of gimmickry to pack 'em in. In 1985 it was the "Living Unicorn," a goat whose horns had been surgically fused. The stunt drew criticism from animal-rights activists but boosted ticket sales by more than 20%. Says Feld: "P.T. Barnum would have been proud."

Feld inherited the business and his know-how from his father, the late Irvin Feld, a flamboyant promoter who bought the faltering circus from John Ringling North for $8 million in 1967. At the time, the acts and the performers were aging. The show had only a dozen clowns, some in their 70s and 80s. The senior Feld threw out the freak shows, hired new acts, stepped up the pace of the show and started the world's first clown college. Determined to get the best performers, he bought an entire West German circus for $2 million in 1968 just to snare its star, Gebel-Williams. After the younger Feld graduated from Boston University in 1970, he didn't have to run away from home to join the business he wanted to pursue. He became the ringmaster when his father died in 1984.

A typical Feld circus unit is a major logistical production that travels in its own 45-car train, costs $600,000 a week to operate and employs some 140 performers, 120 stagehands and 90 animals. Each show has its own star attraction. Feld's biggest has been wild-animal trainer Gebel-Williams, 55, who is on a two-year farewell tour after a career of more than 11,000 performances and 500 stitches from mishaps with sharp-clawed cats. Gebel- Williams changed the nature of animal training by developing close bonds with his animals, which range from Bengal tigers to Lipizzaner stallions. Nine of his elephants have been with him for 30 years. With Gebel-Williams retiring, Feld has hired a new star trainer, 29-year-old Flavio Togni of Italy, who performs with his family and a menagerie of 15 elephants, 42 stallions, a white rhinoceros, two tigers and a black panther.

Feld has become an ice-rink impresario as well. The company created an ice show under license from the Disney company in 1981 and now has five touring companies. One of the shows, which stars Mickey Mouse, features 60 skaters (average age: 21), who perform scenes from such cartoons as Steamboat Willie and Fantasia. The skaters need 245 costumes, which contain "enough spandex to cover a football field," the promoters say.

The latest Feld spectacular is the Siegfried & Roy magic show. Staged in the $25 million theater of the new Mirage Hotel, the show features the illusionists in an epic, space-age story populated by a cast of 70 performers. Among the two dozen animals in the show are Siegfried & Roy's rare white tigers, which the performers have bred with the help of the Cincinnati Zoo.

The man behind all this bombast is a buttoned-down, short (5 ft. 5 in.) dervish of an executive who travels 500,000 miles a year and writes all his business down on yellow legal pads so that he can keep track of the hundreds of decisions he makes each day. "You don't do this if you don't love it," he says. "The pressure is a killer." His family complains that he is never home for dinner, but his three daughters enjoy the fringe benefits of attending rehearsals and meeting the clowns.

Feld's biggest concern is keeping his shows fresh in an age when young people have a high and still rising threshold for amazement. His search for new talent and incredible feats is never-ending, but that's the way he likes it. Says Feld: "Nobody in the world has a job like this." Spoken like P.T. Barnum!

With reporting by Stacey Welling/Las Vegas and Don Winbush/Montgomery