Diabolical pursuits

By Paul Carlucci

Scott McClelland is a quintessential Jekyll and Hyde character. one minute he's soft spoken and genial, with a welcoming smile. The next, he's shooting this disgusted look right through you, feral revulsion running through his eyes.

It's a suitable duality for the producer of Canada's largest sideshow, Carnival Diablo, and McClelland dips deeper into his dark side as showtime draws near. On April 1st at The Opera House, Diablo marked it's 13th Anniversary, a special benchmark for the sort of man who keeps a stuffed two headed calf in his living room. Once McClelland takes the stage, he is Nikolai Diablo, an imposing ringmaster with a cartoonish leer, ashen face and a stark, black X stamped into his forehead.

The carnival has come a long way since it's Calgary beginnings as an interactive document of the Victorian sideshows of old. Then, it was a stationary tourist attraction designed to venerate the success of his grandparents, two love struck Ukranian immigrants who built one of Canada's first sideshows.

The Victorian decor is still a part of the performance but today's Diablo represents a new phase in sideshow developement . Where Jim Rose Circus is a gaggle of foul mouthed skids stapling dollar bills to their foreheads and the Brothers Grimm Sideshow is sadly sanitized, Carnival Diablo is a dark experience steeped in art and character, reinforced by eloquent scripts and a surreal stage presence.

The first half of the show is all Nikolai. Beneath the ornate arch festooning the stage, he starts with a game of Russian Roulette: an audience member conceals a spike beneath one of a dozen paper bags and, reading the participants eyes, Nikolai flattens all but the menacing bag with his out stretched palm. He moves on to mind reading and a group seance and, by the time he eats razor blades and drinks boiling water, the audience is under his hex.

The second half mixes the old with the new. There's the traditional sideshow fare: strongman SINN bends iron bars in his teeth; Countess Vanessa eats bugs with a glass of wine and burns off the calories with a barefoot stroll across broken glass; Istvan Betyar swallows a broadsword and bows from the waist. The modernity comes in the show's climax, which leaves the audience stunned: Phillipe Barbosa hoists himself off the stage by two meathooks pierced through the flesh of his back. Languid and lithe, he swings around like a ballerina's nightmare, blood streaming from his wounds.

The Diablo spell lingers long after the curtain closes, as the audience files out to the suddenly strange universe of streetcars and bars along Queen st. East.