Review: THE SECRET CIRCUS THE MUSICAL at Mudlark Theatre

The best thing about THE SECRET CIRCUS is that it knows exactly what it is and commits without apology. Chanel Samson and Holly Anne Mitchell's original musical, performed at the intimate Mudlark Theatre in New Orleans, is campy, heartfelt and unabashedly earnest in a way that lesser shows would sand down into palatability. It shouts its secrets out loud and dares you to join in.

That daring has lineage. The circus has long served as queer metaphor, the big top as refuge, the performer as an outsider elevated, the ring as a place where the rules of the outside world don't quite apply. THE SECRET CIRCUS works squarely within that tradition, and knows it. Its premise, feelings have been outlawed, and a rock-and-roll ringleader has established an underground Big Top as an act of resistance, is not subtle. It is not trying to be. There is a long and honorable history of queer art that announces its politics in sequins, and this show belongs to it.

What separates THE SECRET CIRCUS from the merely well-intentioned is execution. Samson, who leads the show as its ringleader, is a natural anchor; magnetic without being domineering, campy without sacrificing sincerity. The material could curdle fast in less assured hands, but Samson carries it with the ease of someone who has lived inside it long enough to stop explaining it and simply inhabit it. The audience follows without hesitation.

Where the show genuinely surprises is in its marionettes. They take up space, command attention and earn their emotional weight. In a show built around the right to feel, delegating that argument partly to creatures of string and wood is a quietly inspired decision. There is something disarming about watching a marionette embody vulnerability; it is harder to maintain ironic distance when the thing asking you to feel is already, by its nature, a metaphor.

The Mudlark Theatre, small enough to feel genuinely clandestine, does the show considerable favors. You are not watching THE SECRET CIRCUS so much as stumbling upon it; a hidden gathering, a hideaway tucked into the city's embrace. New Orleans, a place that has always understood the performance of feeling as a civic virtue, makes for an apt host. The venue turns what might be a logistical limitation into an aesthetic asset, giving the underground Big Top conceit a physical reality that a larger house simply could not provide. This is a show that needed to feel like a secret, and it does.

The four-piece house band plays with a looseness entirely at home in this city; unhurried, warm and alive to the room in ways that pit-recorded tracks never are. The audience interaction, including a moment where the crowd shouts their secrets aloud, lands with the right mix of silliness and genuine release. A balloon sculpture offering, charming in its smallness, reads as the show's ethos made physical: here is a gift; it is ridiculous; it is yours.

The one thing working against THE SECRET CIRCUS is its audience, or rather the partial absence of part of it. The crowd skewed adult, and while the show works for adults, functions, even, as emotional permission for people who long since stopped asking for it. there is a circuit it is clearly designed to close with children in the room that went partly incomplete on this night. The show bills itself as family-friendly, and you believe it absolutely; you just wish more families had shown up to test the claim. A roomful of children being told that what makes them strange is what makes them shine is a different, more urgent experience than adults receiving the same message, which is not to diminish the adults, but to suggest that the show's full power remains, on some level, yet to be fully witnessed.

Seeing THE SECRET CIRCUS as an adult, the feeling is less nostalgia than recognition, a reminder, delivered with rock-and-roll conviction and a marionette's worth of charm, that the permission to feel was always yours to take. It is Sesame Street for emotionally literate grown-ups, and it earns that comparison without a trace of condescension.

THE SECRET CIRCUS is small, specific and sure of itself in all the ways that matter. Find it wherever it lands next.