LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, CHILDREN OF ALL AGES!

Last fall, we reported encouraging news.

Feld Entertainment is casting for a new version of the Greatest Show on Earth, as it plans an animal-free relaunch of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 2023.

It's always better with elephants, and a train.  The culture was not destroyed in a day, and making the itinerant circus great again will take more than a few days.

It's official. Ringling Barnum are back, if without the elephants and the train.

If you've missed gawking at human cannonballs and unicycling clowns under a figurative big top while the smell of popcorn wafts through the air, you're in luck: The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus is being revived less than a decade after it shuttered.

The iconic traveling circus, which in 2017 halted performances after more than 140 years in operation due to dwindling ticket sales (and years of controversy for its continued use of animal performers), will return in September 2023, production company Feld Entertainment announced Wednesday.

The circus' famed title -- "The Greatest Show on Earth" -- remains. But notably missing from the new show are live animals: Elephants, tigers and the rest of the beasts whose appearances in the circus drew ire from animal activists and audiences before the original show ceased, are not included in the revamped tour.

There are other itinerant circuses travelling, some with animal acts including, where permissible, elephants.  As long as there are jugglers, acrobats, mimes, and contortionists, there will be circus.  So let it be with Ringling Barnum.  That's how the Ringling Brothers got started in Baraboo, before the trains or the menagerie.

Find yourself a circus and go to it.