Clowning around serious business for Zoppe troupe, performing outside at Smith Center

Keeping the family business going requires above-and-beyond effort.

Traveling 22 weeks a year - and logging more than 15,000 miles behind the wheel.

Hammering tent stakes into the ground. Building bleachers. Hovering above the ground on a tightrope or a trapeze.

And, of course, clowning around.

Giovanni Zoppe performs all those duties - and more - as leader of the 26-member Zoppe: An Italian Family Circus.

The one-ring, European-style show - the first outdoor presentation in Symphony Park, adjacent to The Smith Center for the Performing Arts - continues through Sunday.

Technically, only about half of the Zoppe performers are relatives.

"But we've all become family," Giovanni Zoppe says. "We're all Zoppes."

And to be a Zoppe means two things: family and circus.

Not necessarily in that order, because without one, there wouldn't be the other.

That's the way it's been since 1842, when a French clown named Napleone Zoppe and an equestrian ballerina from Hungary named Ermengilda eloped to Venice and founded Circo Zoppe.

More than a century later, things haven't changed much. By design.

"We're about antique," Giovanni says during a telephone interview from a previous tour stop in Northern California. "We're about old-fashioned, we're about real - something you can touch."

And when he says old-fashioned, Giovanni's not talking "50 or 60 years ago."

"Our style is 150 years ago - before the elephants and lions and tigers," he says.

Instead, inside the 600-seat tent - dubbed "Veneto," in honor of the family circus's birthplace - audiences experience a purer, more direct style of entertainment, he says.

"You know how a child dreams of a circus?" Zoppe asks. "We are what they dreamt about."

Even before audiences enter the tent, troupe members welcome them to the show, performing impromptu juggling and balance routines as previews of coming attractions.

Those attractions include equestrian and canine acts - supervised by Zoppe's sisters.

Identical twins perform handstands - 30 feet in the air. A trapeze artist stands on the bar - on his head.

"It's quite an amazing sight," Zoppe promises. As is "a beautiful ballerina on a tightwire."

Zoppe's too modest to mention his own contributions - as Nino, the Clown Prince of Italy. (In 2004, Zoppe - now 46, became the youngest member of the International Clown Hall of Fame.)

Zoppe trained as a bareback rider, following in the footsteps (and hoofbeats) of his father Alberto, who died three years ago.

But little Giovanni "started clowning when I was days old," he recalls.

(Maybe that has something to do with where Giovanni was born in 1966: the parking lot of Chicago's WGN-TV. (Papa Alberto was performing on the "Bozo the Clown" show at the time.)

All that clowning has rubbed off on the next generation - Zoppe's 3-year-old son Julien , who "performs every day in the show," sporting that telltale sign of clowns everywhere, a red nose.

Whenever Zoppe prepares for a performance by donning costume and makeup, he helps Julien get ready, too.

"He wants to be in the ring," Zoppe says of his son. "So beautiful."

Thus the family connection continues from generation to generation, as it did when Giovanni took over from his father, Alberto - the Zoppe who brought the family circus from Italy to the United States in 1948.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus wanted the equestrian expert to join their show and asked what it would take for him to come to America.

The answer: an elephant. So Ringling Bros. shipped an elephant to Italy - and Alberto brought the family circus to America. (If you've seen Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 Oscar-winner "The Greatest Show on Earth," you've seen Alberto, briefly visible performing a somersault on horseback.)

Most people, when they hear the word "circus," immediately think Cirque du Soleil and Ringling Bros., Zoppe acknowledges.

But the Zoppe circus has little in common with three-ring Ringling extravaganzas or Cirque's stylized, high-tech productions.

"We are so old, the way we present our show is new," Zoppe points out, predicting it will be a refreshing change for Las Vegas audiences. "It's not a Las Vegas show, that's for sure."

What it is: a family circus. By family, for families.

"When you look at the audience, you see an entire family out there - the 2-year-old, the 12-year-old, the 18-year-old, Mom and Dad and the grandparents, laughing and enjoying it," Zoppe says. "They're laughing at the same thing, but for different reasons."

Most importantly, they're laughing together. Which is just as it should be, Zoppe says.

After all, "circus is all about family," he says. "If you don't have family, you don't have circus."

Contact reporter Carol Cling at
ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.