“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 £10 million) 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.
But it is a highly unusual move not just to repeat a tour of such scale years on, but to replicate it so faithfully. Across two hours the production differences were negligible, with only a couple of tweaks to the setlist – new song “You’re a Superstar” slotted in seamlessly – with the main point of difference being the continued and still not-quite-explained absence of Jason Orange. But putting aside any retromania concerns and adding to pop’s endless nostalgia complex it is true to say that 17 years on, even in an era of elaborate hi-tech kitchen-sink stadium shows from megastars like Taylor Swift and The Weeknd, there’s still nothing quite like it.
Even if you knew what was coming – or perhaps because people knew exactly what to expect – the band’s reveal from under a huge nest of balloons on the B-stage to open with “The Greatest” was greeted rapturously. For the early hits on the B-stage they leaned on their past – for “Pray” the trio brought out the original dance (at 58, Donald can still bust a move); for “Back for Good” they took umbrellas as they danced through water fountains à la the music video (Barlow particularly remains in great voice).
But things really took off when the main stage marquee was stripped back and the carnival commenced with a euphoric take on 2006 anthem “Shine,” sung by the still cheekily roguish Owen. The band’s costume-change into sad clowns – Barlow applying his make-up onstage at the piano was strangely poignant – made for the trippiest, knowingly ridiculous part of the show: a Hi-NRG camp circus disco medley of their earliest hits, complete with crotch thrusts to first hit “Do What You Like” and Donald and Owen tricycling down the stage runway in impressive fashion (as middle aged men it was no mean feat). Knowingly, Barlow took a clown car instead.
“Never Forget” deployed the marching band brilliantly for an epic back-to-back with “Patience” – “the song that brought us back together in 2006,” as Barlow noted. For “Relight My Fire”, the staging took a darker, after-hours turn, with fire dancers and an updated, imposing 50ft inflatable moving ringmaster that strayed slightly into twisted, Chemical Brothers scary visual territory. With Lulu’s part sang by dynamo former Pop Idol contestant Zoe Birkett, it was rousing set closer. Emotional epic “Rule the World” finished the encore, and with it a spectacle like no other.
Take That play St Mary’s Stadium tonight, then touring
