About
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The online editor/publisher of Spectacle is Ernest Albrecht
Ernest Albrecht was the founder of the print version of Spectacle, which he served for all of its fourteen years as Editor/Publisher. He is also the author of The New American Circus, which was published by the University Press of Florida. It has won world wide recognition and is considered to be one of the most important books on the American circus published in the past 25 years. His first book, A Ringling By Any Other Name—The Story of John Ringling North and His Circus, published by Scarecrow Press, was hailed as “a major contribution to the scholarship of the modern American Circus,” and his third book, Creating the Contemporary Circus also published by Scarecrow Press has been called “a spectacular journey into the processes, aesthetic and commercial, that go into the big ticket big tops of the 21st Century.”
His latest book From Barnum & Bailey to Feld, the Creative Evolution of the Greatest Show on Earth has been hailed as “the most extensive and comprehensive review of the artistic and performance side of the Greatest Show on Earth to date.” “Fascinating” and “Astonishing.”
For 28 years he was the theatre critic for the New Brunswick (NJ) Home News. During that time he published over 3,500 reviews of New York, London and regional theatres and interviewed numerous personalities ranging from Judy Garland to Liza Minelli and Pablo Casals to Gunther Gebel-Williams.
He has published articles in Time, Variety, Theatre Crafts, Bandwagon, Grit, Circus Report, Le Cirque dans l’Univers, Planet Circus, and Circus Zeitung. He has also contributed several biographies of circus artists to Oxford University Press’ American Biography, the entry devoted to circus in The Encyclopedia of American Folk Art, and L’Annuaire Théâtral 32: Cirque et théâtralité nouvelles pistes.
Prior to returning to his first love, the circus, he was for 15 years Producing Director of Plays-in-the-Park, an outdoor musical theatre that has been the springboard for many performers, designers and directors.
Albrecht earned his BS degree from Rutgers University in 1959, winning the award for outstanding contribution to university dramatics in his senior year. His MA in theatre is from Northwestern University, where he also completed post-graduate work in theatre under a University Fellowship in 1964.
He taught composition at Middlesex County College from 1967 to 2005. He has also taught dramatic criticism at Rutgers and Princeton Universities.
Unless an author of a particular article or review is specifically identified, it has been written by Ernest Albrecht.
The principal photographer of Spectacle is Maike Schulz.
Maike Schulz is a professional event photographer who came to New York from Herne, Germany, earning an MFA in photography under mentor photographer Ulrich Mack in 1992. A year later she received a scholarship to Columbia University. It was then that her passion for the circus arts awoke, which to this day is still one of her ongoing phtographic projects. “The circus,” she says, “mirrors my state of mind as someone who loves life and longs for creative satisfaction.”
In addition to Spectacle, her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as Modern Bride, In Style, French Vogue, New York magazine and the Big Apple Circus souvenir books. She is associated with the Gruber Photography studio, New York.
