After a Hiatus, Can Circus Smirkus Revive its Big Top Tour?

In mid-August, when the winding caravan of trucks, trailers and vans has snaked through New England and the young circus performers have staged some 60 shows in seven weeks, the Circus Smirkus Big Top Tour rolls back into Greensboro, where it began.

For the last time, stakes, poles, muscle and vinyl coalesce, and the big top rises in the field at Smirkus headquarters for the final shows of the summer. Colors explode under the midnight-blue canopy dotted with stars. Troupers leap, tumble, juggle and soar with such polish and pizzazz that audience members have to remind themselves: These are kids.

Those kids, ages 10 to 18, hop onto the ring curb for their last bows. With music thumping, they clap along with the audience, heads high, smiles electric. Then they run out of the ring waving — they call that the “pony show” — before circling back onto the curb to do it again. Each and every “Smirko” maintains the “hup-hey” energy until they jog through the back curtain, where their toughest act awaits: It’s time to go home.

Since its founding four decades ago, the nonprofit youth circus, which operates out of a barn on a gravel road, has trained thousands of young acrobats, jugglers and clowns through its school residencies, summer camps and its marquee annual event, the Big Top Tour. Putting that show together in three weeks, then taking it on the road, forges tight bonds between performers. Smirkos slog through mud together, pull dish duty, unload trucks, load trucks, sweep the tent, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and adapt on the fly when the power goes out or one or another of them is injured or sick.

They rally to play to sparse crowds on cold, rainy days and swing through heavy, humid air on sweltering ones, when the heat inside the tent bakes the smell of vinyl forever into their memories.

Going home is a bit like bumping through the Earth’s atmosphere in a space capsule and plunging into the ocean after the most mystical, magical, otherworldly trip. “It’s gonna be awful,” one Smirko said in the 2011 documentary Circus Dreams: A Movie Journey From Mud to Magic. The troupe was gathered in the barn at headquarters for a round of farewells, a ritual they have maintained. One boy sobbed. “I love performing,” he said, “but you guys are the reason I come back every year.”

Circus, with its jargon, traditions and grueling lifestyle alien to so many, offers the most hospitable environment some of these kids have ever found. They don’t say goodbye; that’s another tradition. It’s: “See you down the road.”

But this summer, the tent will stay rolled and stored in a shed. For the first time in 40 years — not counting two pandemic-affected years — the only tented, traveling youth circus in the country has canceled its Big Top Tour. The decision comes amid simmering discontent among parents who have lost faith in Smirkus leadership, and it follows the worst injury to a performer in Smirkus history.

A rigging error caused 18-year-old Johnathan Kamieneski to fall an estimated 14 to 18 feet during an aerial act last July. The canceled shows and resulting $300,000 in lost ticket revenue that followed pushed the nonprofit to the brink of bankruptcy. Still looming is the possibility of a lawsuit or financial settlement.

Like most performing-arts nonprofits, Smirkus has always walked a financial tightrope. But in addition to money questions, the organization faces an existential one: Can a traveling youth circus rooted in old European traditions survive in the age of helicopter parents, social media and constant contact with the outside world?

Two other Smirkus programs — summer camps and school residencies — continue unchanged, according to executive and artistic director Rachel Schiffer. But its flagship, the Big Top Tour, is on hiatus as Schiffer, the board of directors and a team of advisers work to determine if and how it can go forward. The ultimate decision will impact the trajectory of young circus artists and reverberate throughout the circus world.

Losing the Big Top Tour would be “a huge blow,” said Elsie Smith, cofounder and programming director of New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, the longest-running professional circus school in the country. Smith and her twin sister, NECCA cofounder and producing director Serenity Smith Forchion, worked as Smirkus tour coaches for 10 years starting in 2002. The Big Top Tour essentially gives kids professional experience, Forchion said. There’s no other program like that in the country, she said: “There’s nothing even close to it.”

The tour produces artists who are “highly desirable” at circus schools and professional companies, Smith said.

Smirkos are known as “yes” people, Forchion continued. “They’re happy and they say … ‘I’ll help out. I’ll do anything. I’ll tear down the bleachers. I’ll juggle onstage, whatever you need me to do.’” Smirkus alums have gone on to perform with the most prestigious circus companies in the world.

If the Big Top Tour is grounded for good, Smith said, “it’s a whole pipeline that we’re going to lose for the American circus — and internationally as well.”

The Greatest Show in Greensboro

At its core, circus is about people doing what should not be humanly possible: flying through the air, walking on a wire, swallowing fire and contorting one’s body so that parts that don’t normally meet rest comfortably side by side. Circus Smirkus, founder Rob Mermin said, is equally implausible: “From the very beginning, it was a project that shouldn’t exist.” Traveling with a bunch of teenagers doing circus under a big top would appear neither feasible nor fiscally responsible.

As a child, Mermin dabbled in circus arts. Growing up in North Haven, Conn., he taught himself to walk on a wire and to juggle, the latter sparked by his fourth-grade science project on ambidexterity. His small, lean frame would easily swing from a trapeze. But more significantly, his athletic body held a brave soul that yearned for adventure. Mermin wanted to see the world. Circus, he believed, was his ticket: “I didn’t have money, but I had some skills.”

“Circus shmirkus,” his mother replied when he shared his intentions to become a circus performer. Dottie Mermin was a third-grade teacher; her husband, Al, ran the New Haven housing authority. Dottie advised the third of their four children to “get a real job.”

But in 1969, when he was 19 years old, Mermin bought a plane ticket to London and arrived with $50 in his money pouch and a red rubber nose in his bag. Over the next decade, he traveled through Europe studying mime with French legend Marcel Marceau and performing with family-run circuses, many of them six or seven generations old, where everyone pitched in to keep the show on the road.

“I was terribly impressed by the children of professional circus performers,” Mermin recalled. Ten- and 11-year-olds spoke three or four languages. They knew geography because they moved around the map. And they displayed an outsize sense of confidence, which Mermin attributed to their tight, though unconventional, families: “The kids were traveling and working with their parents, their uncles, their grandparents, all living together, eating together, traveling together and working together in a circus ring.”

“Circus is not a job,” Mermin said. “It’s a lifestyle.”

He wanted to bring that traditional European-style circus to the U.S., but he never intended to start a school to churn out professional performers. He launched Smirkus in 1987 — not to help kids perfect their juggling or nail an aerial act but to help them build character and life skills. Circus was just the tool.

Not only did these young performers develop as human beings; they also became highly skilled artists. That first summer, founding producer Jay Craven promoted Mermin’s two-week camp through the extensive network of his St. Johnsbury arts program, Catamount Arts, and 50 kids applied. Mermin took 15 of them, including a brother and sister from a farm down the road.

Circus training did not exist in Vermont in those days. Some kids could tumble. A few rode unicycles. Twelve-year-old Toby Ayer could juggle four balls when he arrived from Burlington. “I was maybe the most circusy of the group,” recalled Ayer, now a 51-year-old physics teacher and rowing coach at Salisbury School in Connecticut and the Smirkus board secretary.

The inaugural troupe staged 10 shows over six days in three towns: Greensboro, Newport and Montpelier. That year the Boston Globe predicted, “Circus Smirkus will be in the annals of American circus history.”

The next summer, the tour nearly tripled: 28 shows in 11 Vermont towns over three weeks. In 1989, it expanded to Massachusetts and New Hampshire. By then, Mermin knew he needed to bring in new coaches to boost skills training, and he aimed for the best. Still intoxicated by that cocktail of naïveté and optimism that had carried him through Europe, he approached the company then considered the best in the world: the Moscow State Circus.

He wrote a letter and got invited to Moscow. Even though his visa hadn’t arrived in time, he boarded a plane. Then he juggled and bribed his way into the Soviet Union, where he met Alla Youdina, a performer and high-level circus official. Ten years of international exchanges followed.

Coaches came from Mongolia and Russia — the KGB sometimes came, too — as well as from Cirque du Soleil, Big Apple Circus, and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Youdina worked for Smirkus in the summers and for Ringling in the offseason, and she recruited the children of Ringling performers and staff. Kids from 30 countries came to Greensboro. Ringling vice president Tim Holst sent two of his own — and scouted at Smirkus for 10 years.

In 1990, three months after he slipped into the U.S.S.R. without a visa, Mermin returned legally with a dozen teens to introduce them to the Moscow circus world. A decade later, Smirkus was dubbed “the United Nations of the youth circus world.”

As its star rose, luminaries dotted Smirkus audiences, including screenwriter Norman Lear, actors Dom DeLuise and Michael J. Fox, and former president and first lady George and Barbara Bush. Julia Child ate lunch prepared in the “pie car,” Smirkus’ traveling kitchen, and pronounced the meal “delightful.”

Sixth-generation Italian equestrian Tosca Zoppé taught Smirkos to balance in a human pyramid on the backs of moving horses, and Marcel Marceau performed in the ring in Middlebury.

As Smirkos sharpened their skills and adopted the discipline of their foreign counterparts, they retained a whimsical American slapstick spirit embodied in the Trouper Contract, which said, in part: “I vow to have FUN, learn something new every day, stretch my muscles and my imagination, and grow a little older, a little bolder this summer … I will look on the audience as invited guests to our living room, and welcome them with courtesy … If I make a mistake, I’ll make it grandly! … with a determination to try again.”

Coaches performed with troupers in the early days, when the original mission statement mandated that kids and adults would work together “as colleagues,” a bedrock philosophy for Mermin. As a teen, he had belonged to a theater troupe run by kids. When he was 16, he thought that residents in the town orphanage might like to participate, so he put on nice clothes and met with the director, who dismissed him as “just a kid.”

Mermin, now 76, never forgot.

“I wanted to give kids the respect that I didn’t get from that adult at that time,” he said.

Smirkus held council meetings every night. Troupers helped develop the show and rules and make disciplinary decisions. When Russian, Mongolian and Chinese coaches who did not speak English arrived, Mermin said, “it was the troupers who went right up to the foreign delegation and took control.”

I wanted to give kids the respect that I didn’t get.

rob mermin

Post-tour, when letters from parents arrived, Mermin braced himself for outrage. “The letter would say, ‘What have you done to my child?’” he recalled. ‘“Here they are, they’re making their beds; they’re washing their clothes … We barely recognize them.’”

Though he meets troupers each year and remains available for consults, Mermin has not worked for Smirkus since 2006. By that time, the company, out of necessity, had relied on an executive director to run its business side for about a decade. As Smirkus grew, Mermin said, it shifted from a founder-based organization of artists who employ managers “to an institution run by the administrators who hire artists.”

Sometime in the late 1990s, Mermin said, the board of directors removed the words “as colleagues” from the mission statement — another sign that his wildly unconventional enterprise was being nudged in a more traditional direction.

Show Stopper

Puffy white clouds drifted across blue skies on July 22 in Wrentham, Mass., the eighth stop on the 2025 Big Top Tour. The show, “Game On!,” featured acts inspired by board games. Troupers flipped, cartwheeled and clowned their way through Monopoly, Mousetrap, Candyland and checkers. Barrel of Monkeys performers, wearing red costumes, hooked their arms and legs around hoops hanging in midair.

With temps in the 70s and the smell of popcorn in the air, the noon show at Wrentham’s Cracker Barrel Fairgrounds played to a small but enthusiastic crowd. The evening performance drew an equally appreciative audience. The chess act came shortly before intermission. The aerial silks routine was designed to embody the feeling and regal look of the game. “We were all chess pieces in black and white costumes,” said Skye Jogl, who was 18 at the time.

Playing the queen and king, she and another aerialist entered standing on the shoulders of other performers. Lev Eisner and another trouper each stood high on a pole just outside the ring, wearing a harness equipped to clamp onto a rope. When the queen and king grabbed onto the silks, Eisner and the other performer descended the poles, and their bodies provided the counterweight to lift the king and queen into the air. Eisner’s job was finished.

Johnathan Kamieneski and another aerialist climbed two other silks, joining the king and queen in the air. The four wrapped the vibrant red fabrics around their waists and legs, allowing them to twist, turn and arc gracefully above the crowd.

“It’s magic at some point,” Jogl said later, describing what it’s like. “I feel so cool and powerful and in control.”

The four hung upside down, as if their legs were draped over a bar, then pulled themselves up, splayed their legs wide and continued to roll forward, pointing their heads toward the floor.

That’s when Jogl, still high in the air, saw an audience member jump. They do that sometimes when they’re wowed by a trick, she said later.

Then she turned and saw Kamieneski and his red silk on the tent floor.

This doesn’t happen, she thought. Her mind ticked through the devices holding the performers aloft: the carabiner, the figure eight, the swivel. What could have broken?

Kamieneski had plummeted, rotating forward as he fell, before landing on his back and slamming his head. His legs were last to hit the floor. He sat up and swayed, forward and back.

Jogl was still in the air when the music stopped and the show boss appeared below, providing some reassurance, Jogl said: “I was like, OK, adult. Adult here. Adult in charge.”

The show boss directed the performers offstage. Jogl and the two other aerialists slid to the ground, where several other troupers had been performing. In a flash, Jogl pulled her thoughts together: She and Kamieneski were the oldest kids in the act. She had to show the younger performers what to do. The audience could still see them. Keep it together until you’re backstage, she told herself. She and the younger artists filed in an orderly fashion through the back curtain.

At the time Kamieneski fell, Eisner was walking back to the tent to get jump ropes ready for the next act when he heard the music stop. His first thought was that the power had failed. But the lights were still on, he realized. And the music didn’t come back.

Cutting the music indicates that something’s wrong, Eisner said. Normally, that’s minor, but everyone has protocols to follow. The head coach, who had been walking beside Eisner, ran toward the tent. Eisner hustled to the stage-right entrance but stayed outside. He could see people in the ring huddled over someone.

When a trouper twists an ankle or wrenches a shoulder, they leave the ring quickly, Eisner explained. But no one left. As minutes ticked by, it was clear that the jump rope act would not go on anytime soon. He went to the backstage tent to wait for news. Adults from the tent crew and pie car staff were there, trying to comfort the younger children.

Audience members began trickling out. The rest of the show was canceled, the troupe learned. They were shepherded to the “dink,” the dining tent, a bit farther away. From there, they heard sirens and watched an ambulance come and go. Kamieneski was conscious, a coach told them. He was talking and could move his fingers and toes, news that gave them a tiny bit of relief.

Uncertainty, but relative calm, prevailed the next day, Eisner said. The troupe remained in Wrentham, though their two shows there had been canceled. When the tour resumed two days later, it did so without aerial acts.

Kamieneski, sitting in a wheelchair, attended a show at the next stop, Waltham, Mass., four days after his fall.

He and his parents declined to specify his injuries. Amy Haderer, a family friend whose daughter toured with Kamieneski in three previous years, said he was not paralyzed but had sustained at least 14 fractures. “It’s almost like his spine just cracked like a marble column all up and down,” Haderer said. He also fractured his heel, injured tendons and bit his tongue, she said.

His fellow troupers had to wait several days to learn the cause of the fall: When the tent went up in Wrentham, a rigger fed the wrong end of a rope through the hanging apparatus at one of the points designed to support aerial equipment. As a result, any equipment that hung from that point — silks, ropes or straps — got attached to a loop on the rope that was not designed to hold weight.

The professional rigger left Smirkus after the accident, a mutual decision by both parties, Smirkus director Schiffer said. Kamieneski has not sued Smirkus, but that remains a possibility, said Jane Young, one of his lawyers.

The tour continued without aerial acts through Massachusetts and Maine. It felt like uncharted territory, said Eisner, a juggler. The show was no longer the one they’d worked so hard to create, and their troupe wasn’t whole. “You’re down a person, and it’s just not the same,” he said.

He watched his castmates process the accident. “Everybody accepts that your risk of injury goes from zero to nonzero when you decide to do anything like this,” he said, but for some kids that had been strictly intellectual knowledge. Kamieneski’s fall, Eisner said, made it emotional: “Now I know. I have seen what this risk looks like. And that is an awful thing to experience as a young kid.”

Still, the mood wasn’t gloomy. “We’re all pretty joyful kids,” Eisner said. “We felt like we were able to continue being with our sort of chosen family in a way that is meaningful and valuable.”

Kamieneski visited two or three times, Eisner said, and that helped: “He’s such a funny guy, and he maintained his humor through this all.”

But after hearing from tour leaders, Schiffer decided that the kids needed time to come to terms with the gravity of the accident without managing the rigors of the road. She canceled the last two stops and brought the troupe back to Greensboro a week early. There, aerialists were gradually allowed to resume their training. “I was ready,” said Jogl, who headed to Sweden after the tour to begin studying aerial ropes at Stockholm University of the Arts. “I was antsy. I was like, I want to get back in the air. I miss doing this. I need to see that I can still do it.”

NECCA’s Elsie Smith was on hand to help. “By the third day, we were back to running choreography, and the students were demonstrating that the sort of mental health concerns that we had for them were largely unfounded,” Smith said. “They were just so excited to be coming together again, to be able to show off their hard work to their families at the final show.”

Troupers performed modified aerial acts at those two final shows in Greensboro; the chess act was not among them.

Kamieneski, of Bedford, N.H., is now 19 and a first-year student at the University of Tampa. Though his mother, Shannon Danforth, declined to answer other questions, she did say: “He has had to redefine what life looks like for him.”

Flying Under the Radar

It would be easy to point to the accident as the reason for canceling this year’s Big Top Tour. But while traumatic, Kamieneski’s fall and the questions it raised were only a small part of the equation.

Times have changed since founder Mermin bought the old Richardson farm and pitched his outlandish idea for a circus at a Greensboro town meeting. The Big Top Tour demands a lot of everyone involved, Schiffer said. She toured as a Smirko for 10 years and has held several Smirkus jobs. Kids, coaches and staff pull together to produce the tour, and it only works when everyone wants to be there, she said.

The demanding lifestyle hasn’t deterred families. It costs $9,000 to join the troupe, and about 75 kids audition each year. But it’s become harder to find staff, Schiffer said. Seasonal jobs that require hitting the road and bunking in a trailer have become less appealing. Rising costs and declining ticket sales in the past five years have slashed revenues. While all Smirkus programs cover their own expenses, the tour, which costs more than $1 million to mount each year, has the slimmest margins.

Circus Barn, the nonprofit that operates Circus Smirkus, lost more than $250,000 in 2022 and 2023 and started 2025 with a $144,300 deficit. It ended the year $35,000 in the black, but only after a crisis fundraising campaign launched last September brought in $546,000. The money, board president Justin LeBlanc clarified, will be used for operating costs, not a possible financial settlement from the accident. Smirkus has “comprehensive insurance coverage,” Schiffer said, but declined to provide details.

In addition to financial woes, Smirkus is facing discontent among some trouper families who say they have lost faith in the Smirkus administration. After the 2024 tour, many kids eligible to return did not — 10, by one veteran trouper’s count. Eighteen of the 28 cast members last summer were first-year troupers.

“Kids never want to not go back,” said Heather Lawson, a Wilton, N.H., mother who had at least one of her two sons in camp or on tour for five summers. But mounting disappointments over the care of troupers on the road and the perceived failure of administrators to respond to parental concerns came to a head in 2024, prompting Lawson, Amy Haderer and Chrissy Fox to not send their children back — and their children agreed, they said.

“We all have seen what magic and beauty the organization can be,” Lawson said. But starting around 2022, she said, she saw “a steady decline in the leadership and the decision-making, to the point where it has been unsafe and the kids are not well cared for on tour.

“And it’s not the people who work directly with the kids,” she clarified. “It’s the people making the decisions.”

Lawson is part of a vocal contingent of Smirkus parents that cites numerous shortcomings: Counselors, many barely older than troupers, are stretched thin, and turnover is high. Trouper housing on the road — typically with host families, which Smirkus coordinates — is not always appropriate. And the real deal-breaker, according to parents: No medical professional accompanies the tour.

Disgruntled parents place blame on the board of directors and on Schiffer, though some of their complaints predate her ascension to the top job. Schiffer, 41, succeeded Steve MacQueen, a longtime arts administrator who joined Smirkus in 2022 after 10 years as artistic director at the Flynn. He stayed only a year. The post needs “a circus person,” he said. “That’s not me.”

Schiffer is a circus person. After touring with Smirkus as a teen, she returned to work as the tour’s house manager, then head counselor. She toured Europe as an aerialist for nine years before returning to Smirkus in 2022 to become camp director. She added the title of co-interim executive director of the entire organization the following spring and became executive and artistic director in December 2023.

“She’s a great choice,” said Molly Saudek, a Smirkus alum and internationally acclaimed tightwire walker who has known Schiffer since she was a child. Schiffer is practical and levelheaded, Saudek said, and “knows the DNA of Circus Smirkus in and out.”

This is a really rare thing, to have a kids’ circus, and there’s a reason: because it’s really dangerous and expensive.

“She’s not susceptible to being bowled over by egos and theater parents and difficult situations,” Saudek, 49, continued. But, Saudek added, it’s a big job. “It should be two jobs,” she said. Most arts organizations have an executive director and an artistic director. Schiffer is both. She arrived with limited executive experience — four months as codirector of Wilton, N.H.’s Flying Gravity Circus and some executive duties in Europe — but Saudek maintains that Schiffer is qualified for the dual role: “If you’re going to put somebody in that job, she’s a great person to have there. There’s no question.”

Some parents disagree, citing the lack of a dedicated troupe medical professional as the most glaring evidence of Schiffer’s poor leadership. “If you are touring with 30 children who are acrobats, having a nurse and proper safety oversight should be the absolute baseline,” said Fox, whose daughter, Lucy Gardner, was a trouper for four years.

Schiffer said the topic has been discussed since she returned to Smirkus in 2022. Smirkus camps have a nurse on-site each session, she said, but finding a medical professional willing to hit the road for even part of the summer has been difficult. In lieu of that, the tour has a team of doctors a phone call away ready to advise on nonserious injuries and ongoing care, Schiffer said: “For any acute injury we’re going directly to the emergency room anyway.”

In addition, tour staffers trained in first aid and CPR are on-site at all times. In 2025, there were seven or eight, according to Schiffer.

When Kamieneski fell, a nurse in the audience stabilized his head and neck until an ambulance arrived. “We had people trained to do that same job,” Schiffer said, but emergency protocol dictates that if someone with higher certification is on the scene, they take the lead.

Parents say the lack of a nurse or doctor means no one person keeps charts, handles medications or provides follow-up care. And, they say, it has allowed minor conditions to spiral into major ones. When Gardner sustained a suspected cracked rib shortly after arriving in Greensboro in 2022, counselors didn’t follow the care regimen a local doctor prescribed, she and her mother said. Fox took her daughter home to Connecticut to recover. Later that summer, Gardner cut her heel in a quarry. A counselor changed the bandage for her each day. But an infection, which appeared as red and blue tendrils, climbed up Gardner’s ankle, and Fox took her daughter home again, this time for two weeks.

Troupers are together around the clock. Germs spread like it’s a kindergarten. When pink eye and other illnesses worked their way through the troupe in 2024, Haderer said, her daughter, Lyric Swagman, was sick for about three weeks. At one point, she was tucked in a car with blankets and cushions and missed lunch. “I had to DoorDash her food,” Haderer said. Then, she said, she got a call “out of the blue” asking if someone could pick Lyric up. “And I’m like, ‘I live in Denver. I can’t just drive a couple of hours and pick her up.’”

Aerialist Jogl got sick each of the three summers she was on tour. She said it was unclear who was ultimately responsible for deciding when to send a trouper to urgent care or clear them to perform after an injury or illness.

The Big Top Tour falls between regulatory cracks. The Vermont Department of Health grants Smirkus a license to operate camp, but the department’s annual inspection focuses only on the kitchen and lodging in Greensboro. The Vermont Department of Labor, which includes the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has no jurisdiction over troupers because they are not employees.

“This is a really rare thing, to have a kids’ circus, and there’s a reason,” Fox said. “Because it’s really dangerous and expensive. They’ve just been flying under the radar.”

“I love Smirkus,” she continued, “but they have to do this safely.”

A Big Tent

Other parents have no qualms entrusting Circus Smirkus with their children’s care. Debbie Steinig’s son, Lev Eisner, joined Smirkus as a 13-year-old camper in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The camp’s protocols kept kids COVID-free, she said. Her son returned to camp for two more years and performed in the Big Top Tour for three. “I was very satisfied that my child was safe, that my child was cared for, that any medical needs my child had were properly seen to and properly communicated with me,” said Steinig, a Baltimore middle school teacher who joined the Smirkus board of directors in January.

Even without a troupe doctor, the system worked while Troy Wunderle directed the show, some parents say. Wunderle toured with the show for 24 years. His wife, Sara, who toured with Smirkus for 16 years, was the tour administrative director. She has a bachelor’s degree in physical therapy and had worked as a licensed nursing assistant, so she also served as the tour’s health adviser. Troy kept an open-door policy for troupers to talk about anything, he said, and he met with each of them for a mid-tour evaluation. Parents called the emotional and social support he provided “parental scaffolding.”

The 26-year Smirkus employee was let go in 2022 because the board, in an effort to bring in a variety of artistic visions, decided to hire a new director each year to create and launch — but not tour with — the show.

Morale declined after that, said a 19-year-old alum who performed under Wunderle for two years and his successors for two more. “It’s just kind of felt like a burning house since Troy left,” said the alum, who asked to remain anonymous because he hopes to work in circus.

Wunderle had been “a big morale booster,” trouper alum Gardner agreed. “He was a glue between the coaches and the troupers and the staff, and he was kind of a designated person to go to if you were worried about something in a show.”

The 2024 tour eroded the last of some parents’ confidence. In early June, staffers were still looking for hosts to house troupers for multiple nights in five towns, which led Lawson to believe that the hosts could not be vetted properly. One of three counselors left mid-tour. Two weeks later, parents learned that the troupe manager would go home and continue some, but not all, of their duties remotely. Two days after that, the tour general manager left.

The final blow came after the tour ended, when a video surfaced on social media showing three troupers with alcohol in a cabin where they were staying while on tour in Maine. The kids had been placed in cabins, at least one of which contained alcohol, without an adult. The host was in another home on the property. Enforcing Smirkus’ zero-tolerance policy on drug and alcohol use, Schiffer banned the three from returning in 2025.

A fourth trouper, 11-year-old Layla Cotton, was placed alone in one of the cabins. The door didn’t lock, “and I was really really really scared,” she later wrote in a letter to Schiffer and the board. The older kids looked out for her, she said.

The host had already made the kids uncomfortable. While taking them to the cabins, said Layla’s mother, Lisa Palencia, he demonstrated how he could drive without holding the steering wheel. One of the kids recorded a video during the car ride. In it, according to Palencia, he tells the kids, “Oh, your parents are very trusting to let a crazy guy drive you guys around.”

The incident darkened Layla’s impression of Smirkus. At first, she wrote in her letter, it felt like Disneyland, “but Smirkus was not really like Disneyland. It was like Neverland and Peter Pan because the kids took care of each other and the kids Cared [sic] about each other and the grown-ups didn’t care to listen.”

Twenty-five parents appealed to the board to reconsider the dismissal of the three older troupers and instead take a restorative-justice approach. They claimed that Smirkus was also culpable because the organization failed to fulfill its obligation to house the kids appropriately. “That, for me, is a Smirkus problem also,” Haderer said.

Eleven board members signed a letter standing behind Schiffer’s decision. The sole member who did not, Tristan Cunningham, resigned instead. The kids acted poorly, she said, but, she told the board, “They were not set up for success. They asked to leave. They were unsupervised, and there was alcohol.”

Steinig, who joined the board after that decision, said she respects it: “Given the legal landscape, I don’t know any organization in the country that would have made a different decision.”

Steinig said some trouper parents told her that they were glad to see Smirkus take a strong stance against drinking. “Other people are throwing and catching my child,” they told Steinig, “and I can’t have those people be impaired.”

That particular homestay situation prompted the formation of two committees comprised of parents, troupers and staff: one to recommend updates to disciplinary procedures and the other to do the same for homestays. Steinig worked on the disciplinary committee. New policies have been implemented.

Steinig argued that the exercise refutes parents’ claims that Smirkus administrators don’t listen to their concerns. “Some people walked away from the organization, and that’s your right, and we respect that,” she said. “But some people stayed and helped do the work and helped make the changes.”

The controversy surrounding the drinking incident actually reflects positively on Smirkus, board president LeBlanc suggested: “One of the great strengths of the organization is the deep caring by lots of people — and sometimes they disagree on how things could play out.”

Down the Road

Schiffer, who grew up as a Smirko in the Rob Mermin era, now runs the company in a seismically different time. Society has changed dramatically since the 1980s and ’90s, Mermin acknowledges, but Smirkus didn’t follow the societal rules of the day when he founded it. “Circus has always been on the fringe,” he said. Schiffer just has to navigate a new set of challenges.

Last fall’s funding campaign exceeded its goal by nearly $150,000, allowing Smirkus to keep its doors open. Of six furloughed staff members, four are back at work; the other two positions were eliminated.

An outside team of rigging experts is evaluating safety protocols and developing rigging policies, procedures and checklists for the tour and camp. Meanwhile, Schiffer continues to consult tour alums, staff, and past executive directors and tour operators to figure out if and how the Big Top Tour can return.

“Everything’s on the table right now,” Schiffer said. The troupe could shrink, stay closer to home, move sites less frequently and bring adult performers back into the ring, Schiffer said. The tour may sit “in residence” on the property of another nonprofit that attracts visitors. Smirkus will consider they way it presents shows — with partners, who pay a fee and earn the ticket revenue, or without, which means that Smirkus earns all of the revenue and assumes all of the financial risk.

“I think it will be a tour that is different than what we’ve been familiar with in the past in terms of the structure,” Schiffer said, “but I am pretty confident that there will be a show in 2027.” Whatever shape its takes, she said, its core principle will remain: “It needs to highlight the youth.”

So far, she and the board agree on one thing about the tour: “We all want to see it come back in a way that is sustainable and that is replicable.” Schiffer aims to have models ready for discussion by mid-May and to choose one by the end of June.

I am pretty confident that there will be a show in 2027.

Rachel Schiffer

Mermin, who has served as one of Schiffer’s consultants, applauds the company’s decision to take a break from the tour. As an outsider, he said, “I’m thinking, Holy smokes! How the heck is that thing still on the road after almost 40 years?”

“I don’t think they can really go back to what it was, or what it was in my day, because people are different,” Mermin continued, adding that 40 years is a remarkable run. “And I don’t have any sadness if the company changes what they do.”

In fact, he’d like to see Smirkus create new programs. “I would love artists from different disciplines to be able to use the tent in different ways,” he said, “because it’s just a magical feeling in there.”

Jogl, who has aged out of Smirkus, said she believes most troupers think Smirkus made the right call canceling this year’s tour. Directors had considered a downsized program, she said, but “I think it’s better to have no tour than a very compromised, cut-back, cut-down tour.”

Many want to see the Big Top Tour back next summer, in time for a 40th anniversary celebration. For now, though, no one knows what will happen. The uncertainty feels both exciting and overwhelming, Schiffer said. Much like the adventure that defines circus itself.

Despite all of their advance planning and ongoing rehearsals, Smirkos never know exactly what they will encounter on the road.

In 1989, a tornado in Putney knocked down trees and telephone poles but left the Smirkus tent, “Old Blue,” standing, and the show went on by torchlight. In 2008 alone, director Wunderle drove a stake through a town waterline, the pie car trailer came unhitched on the interstate and passed the truck that was pulling it, and a rental generator fried the tent lights. Then biblical rains fell in Kennebunkport, Maine, and the show’s trucks sank to their axles.

Uncertainty is a key component of adventure, and adventure has been part of the Smirkus mission from the beginning. As founder Mermin said, “You have to step out on the path of adventure with good intentions and good faith but then see what happens.” ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Up in the Air | An accident and near bankruptcy forced Circus Smirkus to cancel its Big Top Tour. Can the Greensboro youth circus bring it back?”

This article appears in April 22 • 2026.

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