Photo credit: Rich Kessler Photography
All Aboard, you’re in for a great ride – and no, it won’t take you to NYC or Chicago for that matter; but it will take you to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey exclusive dining experience on the legendary Ringling Bros.circus train. Pie car chef Matt Loory invited the media to a global culinary journey, preparing dishes from some of the more than 50 countries represented by the cast and crew of LEGENDS! prior to the evening performance.
Attendees were transported from the Verizon Center to the circus train. After climbing aboard the train’s pie car, guests enjoyed dishes such as Mexican Chilaquiles and Japanese Spaghetti and Meatballs prepared by the classically-trained chef. Chef Loory was also available for questions about cooking for the LEGENDS! cast and crew of more than 300. Ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson and circus performers were on-hand to answer questions about living on the train and provide insight into a performer’s daily diet. And no, you can’t rent either the train or Chef Loory.
Chef Loory
This year’s show LEGENDS features the Solar Hawk trapeze act, amazing big cat performances, hilarious clown antics, and Ringling Bros. majestic Asian elephants, uniting iconic circus stars with mythological creatures to create The Greatest Show On Earth.® Ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson conducts it all.
Hollywood on the Potomac sat down with Iverson to find out how he ended up on the Ringling Bros. train: “My childhood was rather eventful,” Iverson told us. “I would say it was around 11 years old when I joined the Boy’s Choir of Harlem. I was with them for about seven, eight years. Before then … everything was sort of boring, I guess. I just went to school and church. That was it, but after I joined the Boy’s Choir the world kind of opened up. I’d always wanted to travel and they sort of provided the means to do so on other people’s dime, but nobody told me I had to work. That was the first time I really came to understand the concept of earning your keep. I didn’t realize it was an elite group. It was like a seriously elite group, even though these kids were like me. They were as rambunctious and they were very much adolescents but it was like they had these super powers. I wanted that. For the first 18 months I basically did nothing. In an adolescent’s mind, it was the worst time of my life. All these people were going on tour and performing. I was never chosen and I was just doing minor performances around the city, always rehearsing. But what I didn’t realize was that I was really being groomed and trained for what I would do with them and it was a great lesson. It’s something I’ve carried with me all my life. You have to be scared. You really have to go through a process.”
Ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson
“It’s why I hate all of these talent shows on TV that trivialize really what it is to be an entertainer,” he emphasized. “You get shown a mailman who has a nice voice and everybody’s, ‘Oh my God, America’s Got Talent’ and then you don’t hear from them again because the fact is, there’s a reason why he’s a mailman. He didn’t commit to it. He may have a nice voice but you have to train it and you have to become disciplined in the craft. Then there’s the business of show business that you have to deal with which is a whole different process. Take Susan Boyle. Well, she was wonderful until she got on that morning show and started cracking all over the place and didn’t know what to do. That’s what I’m talking about. You can’t trivialize and that’s what people don’t realize. It’s harder than it looks. The reason why we like reality TV is because it’s really a testament to, ‘Why do you think we like reality TV?’ It’s because we want to really believe that we can get something for nothing. That explains the success of certain people. That’s the heart of it. Everybody wants to believe in the fair tale; that you’re just the one, you’re just chosen. There’s some ethereal reason and it’s not true. Even Jesus had a 30 year education. You have to go through things and we’re so deathly afraid of the process, deathly afraid of struggling, deathly afraid of mastering a craft for some reason or just lazy. And that’s what it comes down to. I’ve seen it time and again. You take that young lady Charlotte Church, do you remember her? Beautiful, but where is she?”
“You see what I’m saying? First of all this business, the entertainment business is hard. It’s harsh. And it’s got some unsavory people in suits who are just vultures and vampires. They have no souls. That’s why you have all these people that go crazy. All those Disney kids, look at them. They’re all like borderline porn stars or something. All of them. They’re all just bugged out. All of them. I mean Miley Cyrus, look at her. The tragedy is she’s actually a really good singer. She’s a really really good singer. She doesn’t need all this stuff she’s doing, but it is what we’re selling people. We’re selling these fantasies that just aren’t real. They’re just paper.”
“That’s what the Boy’s Choir of Harlem taught me. It was a wonderful experience. We didn’t just learn how to perform and sing various genres of music but before we would visit different nations, we would have tutorials with experts in the cultures over there and we’d learn basic sayings. We had etiquette classes. We had all sorts of things. One of the great devices that the director and founder, the late Dr. Turnbull, used was our actual concert. At the end of the concerts we would go and meet the audience out in the lobby of the concert hall. That was a way to develop our social skills. It was also an eye-opener to learn of the different thought processes of various people around the country, and let’s say how they thought of black people; especially black males. It would be funny. We would go to certain places and they were impressed while others were shocked that we were performing Bach and Mozart and doing it well. I remember people would give me money. People would just walk up to me and give me money. It was just strange but sort of an interesting thing on the social dynamics of interacting with other people. When you travel you’re forced to get out of your box. You’re forced to broaden yourself, so it was the greatest gift for me growing up.”
Angie Goff and Amy Baier with their children
Tell me about your parents: “My mother is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. My mother is the beginning. They say you don’t have a choice who your parents are going to be and I remember we hit the lottery as far as a mother is concerned. My mother was very instrumental in really indoctrinating me with self-confidence, indoctrinating me with a sense of identity. New York at the time was not a savory place, it’s not the New York we know now. I grew up during the crack era, during the height of HIV aids, pre-Magic Johnson, where when you got it you were dead before they figured out ways that you could live with it. It was a very, very dangerous place. Also you just had to deal with the different dynamics. My mother was very brilliant at detoxifying my brother and I from the onslaught of media that really savages young minds, I believe, especially the minds of the young black male. You look at the media, and believe me if you had any consciousness at all, you would think that the world actually hates your guts. I think her genius was to teach us how to see the world realistically without the bitterness that could easily accompany that.”
Photo courtesy of production
“I’m paraphrasing, but the great writer James Baldwin said basically to go through life as a black person is really to exist between anger and rage. When you’re really conscious about it, there is some truth to it. I think my mother veered me away from that in a sense that she taught me that if I listened, that if I worked hard, if I was disciplined and I was focused and if I was aware then indeed I was entitled to having the life I wanted. She never shielded me from the realities that I would face. I always applaud my mother for was the fact that she never wanted any medals for being a great model figure. She calls us her medals. She says, ‘You’re my trophies.’ She looks at us now. My brother is an ordained minister and he’s a perpetual student. He’s a very smart man and he is a husband of one wife and he has four children, a son and three daughters. I’m married with two children so my mother’s always in a state of glee, honestly. She’s always telling us, ‘You’re my trophies. If I did anything right in my life it was you guys.’“
“My father, who was actually a beautiful man, was a fire fighter in New York City. He was an immigrant from Trinidad Tobago. I knew him in inches. If my life was a movie he was like a cameo. I knew him in insignificant spurts, put it that way. He and I saw each other more frequently the older I got.”
Kelly Collis and Tommy McFly
Tell us about the show. “It’s a fascinating, fun show. It’s really a tribute to the greatest show on earth. Legends is the greatest show on earth. Basically, it’s reminding people of the fact that we’ve always provided the unexpected. We’ve always awakened the curious. We always say – imagination, fantasy and flare and humbug and the whole bit. We have everything from the world’s greatest menagerie now including prancing pigs and kangaroos. We have a Pegasus and a unicorn and a woolly mammoth. Of course we have just some dynamic acts, the globe of steel, 16 foot steel and eight motorcycles inside of it.”
“We have Alexander Lacey and he has some beautiful tigers and lions that are the most spoiled animals I’ve ever seen in my life, probably only second to the elephants. He has this tremendous act, he’s the greatest here in the United States. We have four foot dynamo Paulo dos Santos all the way from Brazil. He is an extraordinary, tremendous athlete. He’s co-starring in the show as the Legend’s seeker. He’s the one who fictionally goes about during the show looking for these marvelous legends, these acts, and he’s bringing them to the audience as my assistant. And we have so much more, of course, we have the great clowns and we have our access pre-show which allows you to come down to the arena floor one hour before the show and get to actually meet the performers, you get to see the animals, you get to try on vintage costumes and you get to really be a part of the show and that’s free with your ticket.”
The show runs through March 22nd. Purchase tickets here.
All aboard:
