Ever find yourself enchanted by the sparkle of a circus? Not just the outfits (which I’ve always admired)—but the incredible dedication behind the scenes? Well, today’s podcast is a must-listen as I delve into the fascinating world of the Circus Ring of Fame in Sarasota, Florida, with my brilliant guest, Bill Powell.
Funny story: this whole conversation started because I stumbled upon an old photo of myself doing one of my first celebrity interviews—with a monkey from the Royal Hanneford Circus! (Yes, a monkey. It was as hilarious as you can imagine.) That quirky blast from the past sent me spiraling down an acrobatic rabbit hole of circus research, and, wow, did I uncover some incredible stuff!
William ‘Bill’ Powell, who’s the Chairman and CEO of the Circus Ring of Fame Foundation and a circus industry veteran, joined me to share insights into Sarasota’s vibrant circus history and the resilience of this amazing community. Sarasota, as it turns out, isn’t just another sunny Florida spot—it’s the Circus Capital of America, a place where legends have performed and lived since the Ringling Brothers made it their winter home.
Bill’s expertise runs deep. Before leading the Circus Ring of Fame Foundation, he built an impressive career at Feld Entertainment, the company behind iconic productions like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Disney on Ice, and Monster Jam. His background gave him a unique understanding of the art, business, and enduring legacy of the circus world.
But not everything has been bright lights and applause. The Circus Ring of Fame was recently devastated by hurricanes that tore through the area, leaving their iconic home in St. Armand’s Circle Park in need of major repairs. The damage was so extensive that the much-anticipated 2025 Circus Ring of Fame Global Awards Show has sadly been postponed to 2026. Bill shared how this setback has fueled the community’s determination to rebuild. As he put it, “This isn’t our first rodeo hurricane.”
This photo screen shot below of a video posted by The Sarasota Police Department on 9/27/24 on Facebook shows drone footage of the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene . Here is the link to that FB page drone video.
Despite the challenges, the Circus Ring of Fame under Bill’s leadership is finding innovative ways to keep its magic alive. They’ve incorporated QR codes into their legendary plaques, so visitors can scan and dive into the incredible stories, photos, and videos of circus legends who’ve shaped the art form.
Bill also gave me an insider’s view of what makes circus performers so special. He described the circus world as a place where people dedicate their entire lives to creating “six minutes of perfection”.Think about that! From trapeze acts to being shot out of cannons, these performers are the ultimate pros, bringing joy to audiences through unmatched artistry and effort.
If you’re ever in Sarasota, visiting the Circus Ring of Fame should be on your list—especially once the community’s hard work restores it to its former glory. In the meantime, you can support their mission and learn more about these incredible artists by visiting their website at CircusRingOfFame.org.
Listen to this podcast episode of the live conversation with Bill Powell, Chairman and CEO of the Circus Ring of Fame Foundation on The Debbie Nigro Show and get inspired by the magic of circus legends. If you’d rather read than listen the transcript of the audio is below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
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And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
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Wow, I’m reminded of the glitter on all the great circus outfits of all the entertainers I once wanted to become. I think I just liked the outfits.
Hey everybody, I’m Debbie Nigro. Wow, I’ve got a great guest coming up for you today. Just a little introduction about why I’m bringing this guest on. You know, I spend a lot of time accumulating knowledge, okay?
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0:00:43
And I don’t want to be a passive collector of my knowledge, okay? I want to tell you about things that I find out about that I never knew about, like the Circus Ring of Fame. Who knew? Right?
And as I told you earlier in the show, it all was set in motion by me finding an old picture of myself interviewing a monkey. My first radio interview, it was the Royal Hanneford Circus. I’m like, oh, is that George Hanneford? Is he still alive?
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Before you know it, I’m down the rabbit hole doing acrobatics, going through all the information, and I land on a fascinating story that has to be shared.
So what I’m going to do right now is introduce you to my guest, and we’re going to talk more about what’s going on with the business of the circus, because it’s pretty fascinating. And there’s a Circus Ring of Fame in St. Armand Circle Park in Sarasota, Florida, that got destroyed by the hurricanes.
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And they had to postpone the annual awards show. It’s like the Academy Awards of the circus. It’s a global show. My guest right now, William Powell. I’m gonna call him Bill because that’s what he told me to call him,
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the chairman CEO of the Circus Ring of Fame and also an executive with Feld Entertainment for many, many years, the largest live touring family entertainment company in the world. Bill, welcome.
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Nice to be here with you today, Debbie.
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I really appreciate your time, Bill. I know you’re over there in your neck of the woods repairing your own home from the hurricane. Boy, I’m sorry about what happened to you guys down in the Sarasota, Tampa area.
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Oh, yes.
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It’s been an interesting experience, but Floridians have a way of doubling down. I like that. This isn’t our first rodeo hurricane, so it’s bad for a while, then everybody gets it together
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and Florida is a great place to live, so it’s all good. Yeah, I’m a New Yorker who threatens every year to move there right about now. You know, it’s funny, right about now, we’re in the week of Thanksgiving, and as I was reading the history of everything, it seems like it was right around this time of year where the idea came to make this whole big thing, an event, a show, an academy awards, the TV show that you’re very involved with that is being delayed this year because of the damage down there to the actual place where people
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0:03:07
come to honor these circus entertainers. So you want to talk to the whole what’s happening there right now so people understand?
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Yeah, let me give you a little bit of background first. The Circus Ring of Fame was originally started as a convention and visitors bureau initiative by the city and county of Sarasota. And that was back in 1985. And basically, the city and the county gave this perimeter of this park, this land to the circus community so that they could honor the greats of the circus industry worldwide. And it started, I think the first plaques were
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started to put out there in 1987. And now there’s about a hundred and I think 170 plaques. It’s almost the entire perimeter is filled with the life stories of these individuals who’ve made a gigantic impact in the world of circus arts.
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Yep, and you know, I don’t think everybody knew, I had to be reminded that Sarasota, Florida, was the winter home of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus and a lot of other circuses and a lot of circus families.
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Absolutely, I mean there’s literally tens of thousands of people who are in Sarasota now that have a connection, whether it was their great aunt or their uncle or they’re presently in the industry. It’s also the home of Feld Entertainment. They’re right up the road in Bradenton, which is one of the largest live entertainment companies in the world.
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There’s probably 20 circuses that are resident in Sarasota. And then there’s a whole lot of the rest of the industry, which is the people who supply various different components. There’s marketing. There’s a lot of cottage industries that have grown up around it. So it’s very much what we call a circus capital of the world, no different than Las Vegas
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or Monte Carlo or Budapest, Hungary. It’s just this concentration of activity in the circus arts. Sarasota happens to be the one in America.
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Wow, you know, and I don’t think I realized that. What I did try and get to when I was talking about this time of year, Thanksgiving, what I read was that while watching TV over Thanksgiving, Larry Marthaler, who was the guy who was invited by the mayor at the time to try and figure out what to do about this and what to call it, had this aha moment when his wife watching TV and they’re watching the induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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And they’re like, oh, that’s it. That’s it. The Circus Walk of Fame in Sarasota. So that’s how it led to this whole big thing. Yeah, it’s great. Yeah, that was it.
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They were trying to they were trying several different concepts. And then Larry and his wife opted on this. And it really is. It’s the Oscars meets the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s those two things. It’s the honor lifetime achievement, and there’s a physical place where that plaque exists. I think, I happen to think that our
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plaques are much more majestic and prettier, if you want to use the term, than the ones on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I can say without equivocation that the neighborhood is incredibly gorgeous, sparing these storms that have happened recently. It’s just one of the most magnificent places in the west coast of Florida to visit. So we’re very privileged that the city got behind this and helped get this thing started.
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And in 1993, it transitioned to a standalone 501c3, and it’s been in that existence ever since I heard you were very instrumental and steering this Foundation to modern times incorporating technology just sort of bringing it all you know into the with the QR code on the plaque so that You can understand the history of each one of the performers and the legacy. I mean you’ve been very very proactive bill Well, there’s a lot of great stewards that came before me.
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I always like to say in the circus industry that we stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. So I don’t want to discount anything that they have done over the years. But in 2018, when I had been on the board for four or five years, and they asked me to step in as a chair, and I realized that, you know what? The world’s changed.
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It has evolved, and we need to tweak some things, evolve some things, so that we can bring it up to speed. And many of the things that we aspired to do have actually happened since then. One of them was, let’s make an incredible awards show. And it would truly be our version of an Academy Awards.
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The second thing was, is we should update all the plaques. The third thing was is we should create the stories behind the people, because it’s one thing to go and see five paragraphs on a person’s life. Now, they put their phone on the QR code. It takes them to a rich biography of every person.
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There’s video, there’s digital photos, there’s the entire background of why they’re there. So it tells that story. And then the third thing was really the global outreach and the ability for the entire circus industry globally to weigh in and vote on who should be next.
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Yeah, I like that a lot.
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Those things have come together and what’s happened is everybody worldwide globally in the circus industry is very focused on what we do.
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It’s great. I want to just point out that what I read is that nobody enters the circus arts to become wealthy. They do it for the sheer love of performing and bringing smiles to people in the art form, and whether or not it’s flying trapeze or being shot out of a cannon or the tiger acts or whatever, this is something that they commit themselves to and spend their whole lives, and you said this and it was amazing to me,
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creating six minutes of perfection. I thought that was loud.
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Yeah, in fact, if people want to go on to our website www.circustrainoffame.org, there is a video on six minutes of perfection put together by a magnificent team that volunteered their time and their efforts and it really tells that story of what people have to commit to. You know, there’s the famous saying, I think it was by Malcolm Gladwell, that you need 10,000 hours to be perfect in something or to accomplish something.
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And the circus industry looks at that and goes, what do you mean 10,000 hours? I did that by the time I was eight years old. And they continue that because it is, A, it’s an art form, and the second thing is, is it requires a tremendous amount of physical, technical skills to do what they do, and those two things, you don’t let it go fallow. You know, I mean, who headlined the Cirque du Soleil show Mystère at the Treasure Island Casino. I mean, those guys have been doing that since they were 10, 12 years old, and they just
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retired and they’re like 55, but their incredible physical conditioning over the years was kept 1000% perfect. And you think about it, for people to do that, or people like David Smith Sr. and Jr. or the Zucchinis who got shot out of a cannon.
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I know, it’s unbelievable.
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You realize your body weight cannot vary by more than about a pound if you get shot out of a cannon.
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I can’t do that job. I was thinking, you know what I’m thinking Bill, like who’s paying for the health insurance for this occupation? This is like, you could get hurt here.
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Well, let’s say it’s a mixed bag, okay? The larger shows like Cirque du Soleil and Feldman Entertainment’s Ringling Brothers, they offer benefits. Then there’s other shows that they offer partial benefits. And then a lot of the people are small businesses.
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0:11:37
People don’t realize that, but if you’re a circus artist and you have one, two, three acts, you’re basically your own small business. There’s a group of people that I’m fairly close with, the Espana family, and they basically produce their own shows and then they have a summer residency up in Myrtle Beach and they do a couple other European things, and it’s their family, they’re extended members of their family,
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and they’re all together 365 days a year, and they put on that business, and then they come home to Sarasota. So it’s really a mixed bag. Sometimes it can be an individual who’s working for a big company,
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a lot of the other times it’s these family groups that go out and they produce their own shows, and they’re in effect a business.
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You know I was reading the history, I got caught up in the circus world and so I couldn’t get enough of reading about the circus, what you’re doing and Feld Entertainment. And Irvin Feld, I was reading about him, who founded Feld Entertainment, opened a drug store in Washington DC and was selling records like crazy and so he ended up opening a chain of record stores and became a record producer. I didn’t know but his breakthrough came, he said, when he engineered the concept of holding concerts
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0:12:57
in large public arenas that featured entertainers like Sinatra and the Beatles and then he joined the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus as manager and booking agent and then he later bought the circus in 1967 at the time it was struggling but then he moved it from the outdoor setting to indoor arenas and started making money. I even got a bigger kick out of the fact that when he acquired it in 1967, he held a ceremony at the Colosseum in Rome. I was like, how cool is that?
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I knew Irvin Feld very well. He was my first boss.
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Yeah, you had a big career.
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Yeah, I came in to… I worked for Irvin Feld and a guy named Alan Bloom, who was his right-hand lieutenant, if you want to call it. And Irvin was there for about 10 or 12 years, and then he unfortunately passed away. And then I continued with the company ever since.
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But Irvinfeld was a genius, and he was a larger-than-life character.
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I could feel that about him, yeah.
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He was incredibly demanding. He was incredibly demanding, but he was a tough but fair person. Yep. And nobody in the business, and I mean the wider business of the venue industry and everything that we touch had anything but kind words for the guy. They could say he could drive a hard deal, but he always left something on the table so the other person didn’t feel that you know that they were sliding or something like that
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Yeah, that’s a really good. That’s a great lesson in business by the way great lesson We’re out of time But you are a joyful guest and I thank you so much bill powell the chairman CEO of circus ring of Fame foundation for joining Me today if you guys want to see what’s going on there. Please go to their website And and you know support them and you go to Sarasota stop by and see what’s going on when they’re back in action. You know, spend some money, spend some time to the local businesses. And, well, I’m here to support you, Bill.
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Thanks so much for your time. Thanks so much for your time.
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Thank you very much.
