Following the sold-out, standing-room only success of the Circus, Sideshow and Burlesque Festival of Doom in January, international burlesque emcee Armitage Shanks returns to Columbia on Friday, May 4th.  City Roots will host the Carny Preacher Tent Revival, a vaudeville and circus variety show hosted by Shanks and featuring local bohemian circus company Alternacirque, as well as sinister and macabre Greenville-based band Wasted Wine.

Armitage Shanks, the co-founder of Circus Contraption, is one of the most sought after MC/Performers on the International Burlesque & Cabaret scene, having performed at the London & Amsterdam Burlesque Festivals, Italy’s Burlesque Garden, Big Top Follies in Australia, The New Orleans Burlesque Festival, The NY Burlesque Festival, ABSFest in Asheville, CA’s “Ink N’ Iron” and scores of other venues here and abroad. He has a starring role in the upcoming feature film, “The Burlesque Assassins”. He has been featured in Playboy France & Italy, as well as Time Out London, which hailed him " One of the darkest-hearted comperes on the burlesque circuit- not only a biting ringmaster, but a unique singer as well".  Dan Savage of THE STRANGER said, "Armitage Shanks has a voice like honey-coated gravel.  A Victorian Music Hall barker, he struck just the right tone. He was a sinister and louche presence, who put some sex in the air."

Alternacirque is the Columbia, SC-based brainchild of Katrina refugee turned bellydancer and rabble rouser Natalie Brown.  Now in it's fifth year, the up-and-coming bohemian circus features tribal style bellydance, fire eaters and spinners, hulahooping, acrobalance, stilt walkers, sideshow acts and aerial circus arts.  

Wasted Wine is a ramshackle band of bizarre sounds and baffling lyrics. Based in South Carolina and New York, the band consists of multi-instrumentalists/co-lead vocalists Robert Gowan and Adam Murphy, Robert "Buck Dollars" Buckingham on electric guitar and knives, bassist Lou Buckingham, Jane Kemp on drums. Their music is weird, dark, sad, funny, theatrical, self-recorded, and employing countless "exotic" instruments, a mix of Rock, Eastern European Folk, Klezmer, and Cabaret.


Due to the edgy and adult content, you must be 18 or older to ride this ride.  Tickets are $10 online and $12 at the door.  Doors open at 7PM; show begins at 8 PM.