Doesn't everyone love a circus? Even if you don't, I expect you'd love The Candy Butchers, a one-hour show that's best described as a vest-pocket circus with attitude.

It's hard to put your finger on just what that attitude is, which is half the fun. It's eager but surly; truculent but wistful; knockabout slapstick, but also highly skilled.

There are just four of them, but to start, as they work the audience with their cotton candy and who knows what, including a tray of forks (forks?), they seem to be legion and everywhere. Noisy, too, in the swaggering manner of circus or carnival candy butchers, the traditional name for the concessionaires, as they hawk their wares and josh the rubes.

It's not that they're exactly eager to sell you something; more like they're daring you to try to buy. But the cotton candy is real, with its sticky-sweet aroma pervading the perfectly sized New Hazlett Theater.

Suddenly the lights go down, one of them is thrown into the center of the ring -- this isn't so vest pocket that it doesn't have a proper ring with trapezes and other mechanisms -- and they're off. There's no plot, per se, but there's loads of personality: strong man and geek, dominatrix and kewpie doll. Or, as I wrote in my notes (there were no programs), short and tall, red-haired and blonde.

They create a drama of sassy personality, helping and hindering each other, vamping the audience. The skills are circus skills: twirling rings, riding bikes, climbing drapes, balancing, tumbling, soaring, falling, but the accompanying music and interplay of attitude give it an atmosphere more Fellini than Barnum & Bailey.

The central relationship is between the two women, bossy red and smudged blonde, both more zaftig than svelte but strong within the curves. Eventually the stage is in shambles, but suddenly they're all riding aloft, bathed in red light and ethereal music, with a glitter ball working its tawdry magic. Then the lights die, with only the cotton candy machine left in its star spot.

The audience didn't want it to be over.

"A Circus Sweetmeat" is the subtitle. Sweet it is, but tart, too. It's part of the Australia Festival, which means they're all jet-lagged not just in time of day but even season, which may add to the funny tilt of it all.

Kudos to Marko Respondek's wonderful lights and the direction by Stephen Burton, because even mayhem has to be directed -- "well, managed," he said to me after the show.