CircusRingmaster/Announcer
Featured Clown
Assistant Performance Director
A clown 1978-1979 in the Blue unit.
During the 1979 season he performed 60 shows as the Ringmaster/Announcer and during a three week period took on Assistant Performance Director duties. Irvin Feld offered him the full-time Ringmaster position at the end of 1979, which would make him, still, the youngest Ringmaster in the history of the circus, but he declined. Within months of leaving the circus he was again associated with producers Irvin and Kenneth Feld after being cast in Barnum on Broadway.
Featured Clown
Traveled with this "mud show" for the fun of it during a vacation from Broadway work. Enjoyed the freedom of working with a smaller tent show, able to ad-lib around other performances and try more subtle comedy and character ideas.
Steven Michael Harris has worked as a whiteface clown, an auguste clown AND as a character clown over the years. All of the characters (except the dwarfed clowns) illustrated in his children's book, This Is My Trunk, are depictions of himself in the different makeups by the illustrator (Norma Welliver).
[Several of the blue-haired clown pictures are the work of Joe Baraban Photography as taken in 1979 for Texas Monthly Magazine.]
(back to Directory of Professional Experience)
This is from when Muhammad Ali came to see Ringling Brothers with his wife and two children in January of 1978. (One was the newborn infant Laila, the future boxer and celebrity.)Below is a commercial for the circus in 1978. Richard Fick is on-camera announcer (but that is someone else's voice):
