Water for Elephants Circus Designer Shana Carroll Explains the Trick of Fusing Two Art Forms on Broadway

Musical theater and circus are not as effortlessly compatible art forms as Broadway's Water for Elephants makes it seem. It takes a huge amount of skill and an eye for the right talent to build a show that brings storytelling to acrobatics, and vice versa, without exposing any seams.

Shana Carroll, co-founding artistic director of The 7 Fingers, is one of the key masterminds behind this feat of high-flying theatricality. As Water for Elephants' circus designer and co-choreographer, Carroll—alongside director Jessica Stone and her fellow choreographer Jesse Robb—has had to envision a hybrid vocabulary and work flow that makes for a show that is beautiful, compelling and safe enough to put on a Broadway stage eight times a week. 

Broadway Show correspondent Perry Sook took a trip to the Imperial Theatre to catch up with Carroll and her company of world-class circus performers just ahead of their pre-show warm-up. Hear about the artistic journey that made Carroll uniquely qualified to take on this theatrical project, and get an exclusive look inside the continued maintenance it takes to keep this circus train running smoothly.