“Clowns are magical creatures with magical powers, bringing excitement and joy,” proclaims Tom Dougherty. “When you’re at this show, it’s a departure point. We’re going to take you somewhere you’ve never been before and make you laugh along the way.”
Always eager to engage audiences, the multitalented Dougherty (an accomplished musician and actor, too) especially likes the energy that comes with recruiting a child to assist in the seemingly simple task at hand – for example, in this performance, the happy pastime of blowing bubbles.“My aim is to help unify them, to make them all feel they’re part of the laughs and excitement.”
Tom admits that while he may not be a multigenerational circus performer, he is a fifth-generation Brooklynite. In fact, his family still calls the largest borough of New York City home. Tom remembers his grandmother’s stories about the excitement they felt when Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey® came into town, marching straight down Seventh Avenue in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Tom himself never attended a circus as a child and thoughts of becoming a clown were not even a blip on his early radar screen.
The son of a lawyer (his father) and a school principal (his mother), Tom was raised on opera and ballet. His great-great-great-grandfather conducted the Frankfurt Symphony and worked closely with such renowned composers as Mendelssohn, Handel and Schumann. Other relatives were respected architects and painters, as well as poets and musicians, providing Tom with the inspiration to pursue oil painting as a hobby himself.
Tom attended private schools, studied Latin and ancient Greek, and then pursued a major in political science – looking for a way to positively affect the world. He soon became disillusioned with the political atmosphere of the 1970s and directed his attention increasingly towards his artistic bent, studying at Brooklyn’s renowned Pratt Institute for a time. One summer, a friend who ran a children’s theater company asked for Tom’s help in painting sets. He agreed, and when one of the actor’s fell ill, he stepped into a role in one of the company’s productions. By the end of his first performance, Tom was offered an acting contract. “I was always very animated,” Tom reveals. “I guess I just hadn’t realized how it could be channeled until then.”
Tom went on to study acting at the renowned Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner and was putting together a presentation on Shakespeare’s clowns when he read about auditions being held at Madison Square Garden for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey®Clown College®. His interest piqued, Tom feigned an injury in order to miss his acting classes, went to the audition and made the cut, graduating from Clown College several months later and performing with the Blue Unit of Ringling Bros.® for the next three years.
In 1981, Tom returned home to become artistic director of a theater in Brooklyn and wrote a play entitled In the Nick of Time, which was staged at New York City’s Lincoln Center and later in Baltimore, MD, where Tom moved to form his own theater company, Theatricks. For the next fifteen years, Theatricks developed a strong local following but was largely funded by a solo clown show that Tom performed throughout the United States in conjunction with the Cleveland, Baltimore and National Symphonies, among others. He also directed his own clowning school, dispatching clowns in training to several circuses during their third year of a five-year program. When one of his charges failed to fulfill a contract, Tom stepped in and found himself back under the big top where he has remained for more than thirteen years, clowning for such shows as the Big Apple Circus and Cirque de Soleil, and eventually becoming artistic director for a small circus in California.
In 2005, Tom noticed an old friend, Tim Holst, Vice President of Talent and Production for Ringling Bros., sitting in the front row at one of Tom’s performances. Tim offered him a position with the newly formed Gold Unit of The Greatest Show On Earth® and Tom felt as if his life had come full circle. “Ringling Bros. gave me my start in what I love the most. I felt indebted to the organization and honored to tread in the same ring as all the great clowns – some of them my teachers – who preceded me. It has been like coming home.”
Returning to perform in the all-new 138th Edition of Ringling Bros., Tom describes his clowning style as more improvisational and “a bit edgy,” drawing from his varied artistic influences and earning him the title of “Clown Eccentric”. Tom considers clowning a noble profession, if not something even greater. "A clown is a magical creature, with all the powers of a magical creature." Judging by the expressions on the faces of Children Of All Ages, he's absolutely right.