"Out Of This World" circus producer Alana Feld (Tim Pannell for Forbes)
Performers in bright, glittery costumes are rushing about backstage an hour before Ringling Bros. circus’ newest show “Out Of This World” is set to perform in Oakland’s Oracle Arena on a Thursday evening in August. Stagehands push a “clown spaceship”—a modern twist on the clown car—through the backstage area, causing performers to scatter.
While she’s dressed more simply than the performers, in jeans and a fitted jacket, Alana Feld, 36, looks right at home in the colorful chaos watching the circus show she’s taken from idea to live production over the past two years. Performers approach her and kiss her on the cheek. She asks them about their children or upcoming acts. As the daughter of Ringling Bros. owner Kenneth Feld, she grew up with the circus and now she’s tasked with reinventing it for a modern audience.
“The biggest change is the focus of the show,” Alana Feld says. “Now you really know what to look at.” The show opens in outer space with swirling lights mimicking stars in the galaxy projected on ice, bathing colorfully-dressed ice skaters in speckled light. Special effects make each scene appear to take place on a different planet—one red with fire, another blue with ice—as the ringmaster embarks on a quest to find his lost circus acts in space.
The audience might be searching for the heart of the circus, too. Ringling Bros. today is hardly recognizable as the circus Alana Feld’s grandfather Irvin Feld bought for $8 million in 1967. As the third generation of the Feld family to produce Ringling Bros. shows, Alana Feld is tasked with maintaining the historic brand in a circus industry that has declined significantly since her grandfather and father ran the show.
The circus has always been in Alana Feld’s blood. As a child, she spent winters in Florida being babysat by clowns while Ringling Bros. rehearsed. The clowns had Alana Feld and her sisters make clothes for their animals or let them watch I Love Lucy. “The people I was exposed to and having friends who grew up at the circus was really great,” Feld says. “It opened me up to what life is and what kind of people there are and what’s possible in the world.”
The circus is also where Feld learned how to be opinionated -- a necessary skill for her current job. “[Our dad] always used to ask our opinion,” Feld remembers. “Fortunately or unfortunately, we all speak our minds now because of it.” As children, Feld and her two sisters would judge auditions from clowns who were graduating from Ringling's clown college with hopes of joining the circus. “I don’t know what we looked like to the clowns," Feld says with a laugh. “We’d be these three little girls sitting there with binders, taking notes.”
Despite this start, Feld never planned to join the family business and says she wasn’t pressured by her parents. Instead, after graduating from Boston University, she worked at a media research company and ad production company in New York. But she soon realized that she missed the circus. “If I was going to work hard, I really wanted it to be towards something I really cared about,” she said.
In 2003, Alana Feld joined Feld Entertainment, two years after her older sister, Nicole Feld, 38, did the same. The first show she produced was Doodlebop Live!, based on a Canadian television show about three siblings who looked like “weird aliens” in a rock band. “I kind of did everything on that show, which was really fun and a real learning experience,” Alana Feld says. From there, she moved on to Disney Live! before transitioning to Ringling Bros. In 2010, Nicole and Alana Feld produced their first circus show together, commemorating the 200th birthday of P.T. Barnum, which was the first Ringling circus show ever produced by two women. “We bring a bit of a different sensibility to the show…as young women, and now, as moms,” Alana Feld says.
Today, Alana Feld is the sole producer of Ringling Bros. and points to a lesson from her father that guides her throughout the process. “He says, ‘Just make a decision. You’re smart and 90% of the time it will be the right decision. If it’s the wrong one you’ll deal with it,’” she says.
This particular show was notable as it was the first Ringling Bros. show without its iconic elephants. The Feld family retired the elephants in May 2016 after years of conflict with animal rights activists. The decision created a convenient opportunity (as well as a necessity) for Alana Feld to produce a different kind of show. “It kind of creates a burning platform to reinvent the whole thing,” says PwC principle Christopher Vollmer.
While Alana Feld focuses on the circus, her sisters are working in other parts of Feld Entertainment in preparation for eventually taking over the company from their father. "We’re looking at out succession planning,” Alana Feld explained. “We really want to take the divide-and-conquer mentality.”
Kenneth Feld didn’t have the luxury of succession planning himself, having to suddenly assume the CEO role at 35 following his father’s death in 1984. But the empire that the Feld sisters will eventually control is far more complicated than the one their father inherited. Feld Entertainment today has an estimated $1.3 billion in revenue, with shows ranging from the circus to Disney on Ice (which their father licensed from Disney in 1981) and Monster Jam, performing 5,000 shows in 75 countries each year. “It’s been a lot easier for me than for my daughters coming in. I was part of it basically from the beginning,” Kenneth Feld says. “The size of the company is huge now. If I were to begin today, I wouldn’t know what the hell to do.”
As they manage this task, the sisters have the advantage of having their father's perseverance, says Big Apple circus founder Paul Binder. “The daughters are experimenting and trying to figure out what formula really does work, particularly in these large arenas,” Binder says. “The question is: Are they innovative enough to find the way? We’ll see.”
Alana Feld says that challenge is what she loves about her job. "We're the greatest show on earth," she says. "We have to live up to it, and we always have to top ourselves."
Click here to read FORBES' magazine story on how Kenneth Feld has kept Ringling Bros. alive for the past three decades while expanding his live entertainment empire.
