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Under the Big Top
Rating: 3 Stars
Produced, written, and directed by Lucas Kazan. Videography by Leonardo Rossi. Edited by Adam Rom. Music by Andrea Ruscelli. Starring Slava Petrovich, Pietro Rosselli, Ivan Andros, Max Orloff, Sergio Perini, Antonio Armani, Antton, Cesar Moreno, Vilem Cage, Tiziano Cortese, and Max Veneziano.
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Lucas Kazan has recently used the short Italian operas L'Elisir d'amore and Cavalleria rusticana as underpinnings for gay adult videos. Now, in Under the Big Top, he expropriates Ruggiero Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci. Lovers of opera, porn, or both can only hope that this concludes a trilogy, full stop.

Under the Big Top manages to be the most successful of the three, however, partly because most of Leoncavallo's musical mini-tragedy has been jettisoned. His commedia del arte company has been transformed into circus personnel­ clowns, acrobats, roustabouts. What remains of I Pagliacci are snatches of music, traces of story, and, alas, a poorly sung, awkwardly lip-synced prologue. In L'Elisir d'amore and A Sicilian Tale (the title attached to his Cavalleria rusticana travesty in its American release), Kazan tried to come up with sexually explicit gay analogues of the original plots. The results were kitschy enough to provoke unintentional laughs. Here the sex almost always occupies the foreground, and measures up to the standards one expects of a project whose executive producer was Kristen Bjorn.

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The four sex episodes frequently bristle with gestures of joyful, spontaneous bad-boy lust­ Pietro Rosselli sampling Slava Patrovich's foreskin, Vilem Cage nipping Antonio Armani's scrotum, Petrovich skewering gorgeous Max Orloff with his large, curved cock. (Fans familiar with Orloff, whose best-known pseudonym is Pavel Novotny, know the latter sequence is a breakthrough.) There are two one-on-one scenes, an acrobatic threesome, and a backstage four-man spree. The plot doesn't kick in until the end of the first hour, and then kicks in lightly; the ending changes I Pagliacci's double stabbing to a single strangling.