“Who wants to join the circus?” Take That’s Mark Owen asked as the late evening sun beamed on 30,000 fans on the opening night at Southampton’s St Mary’s Stadium. Given Owen and boyband mates Gary Barlow and Howard Donald had just been transported from the B-stage though the crowd on a 30ft mechanical elephant amid a two-hour bonanza of colour and ecstatic motion overload, the answer couldn’t have been more emphatic. You never knew which direction to look: a 40-strong troupe of trapeze artists, fire eaters, acrobats, aerialists, clowns, German wheels, sequin-dressed dancers and marching drummers played amid pyrotechnics, confetti and a light blue hot air balloon that hung still in the air throughout, acting as the production’s emotional north star. Add in 30-plus years of gold-plated hits, and it made for a festival of unfettered joy.
Perhaps a more accurate word for Owen to use would have been re-join. We’ve been here before. And you can certainly see why Take That decided to do The Circus Live again. When it was first staged in 2009, it was a phenomenon, breaking records – 600,000 of the one million-plus tickets went in five hours, making it the fastest-selling tour of all time in the UK – and took the pop stadium show to previously unseen creative heights: an ambitious, lavishly OTT spectacle (the show had a reported production cost of £10m) that was so talked-about the elephant was an early viral star. After the wilderness years and Gary Barlow-as-a-national-punchline era, it established Take That’s reputation post-2005 reunion, and convinced a jealous Robbie Williams, then having his first solo career dip, to briefly rejoin the band.
