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His Work Is the Cat’s Meow

NOT up for the big top? Coinciding with Ringling’s run at Barclays Center in Brooklyn is something of a little top: the Popovich Comedy Pet Theater, which is playing two shows at the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center in Manhattan March 30 (tribecapac.org).

It all starts with a feather or a piece of string. Gregory Popovich, a lifelong circus performer turned cat whisperer, goes through the routine at animal shelters he visits around the country. With caged cats meowing in the background, he plays with a kitten that catches his eye. Fifteen minutes is all he needs.

If it’s playful, he said, if it’s reacting, then it’s a go. Kitten in hand, it’s back to his pet theater to join dozens of trained cats, dogs and geese, all, he said, from shelters. (If it’s not playful, he moves on to another shelter in another city and hopes for better luck.)

Mr. Popovich, 48, a gregarious Dr. Doolittle from Moscow, has been traveling around the United States for 15 years with his show, a 90-minute hodgepodge of wacky skits with animals in colorful costumes performing tricks like his signature one, featuring a cat riding piggy back on a dog.

Each pet (he doesn’t call them animals) gets five minutes of daily training time: that’s currently 16 cats, 14 dogs, 3 geese, 2 parrots and 5 mice. Only the five doves don’t come from shelters. Mr. Popovich’s wife, daughter and six assistants, who double as groomers and somersaulting acrobats, travel with the caravan.

The enterprise is as much a quest to save animals from euthanasia as it is a Russian-style comic entertainment, as Mr. Popovich sees it. The Comedy Pet Theater saves the pets, and audiences — mainly families with children — have a good time. If his message gets across, someone will go home from the show with his book or video about how to train and love a cat, and head toward the nearest shelter.

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Gregory Popovich finds co-stars in animal shelters across the country.Credit...Jerry Metellus

Speaking in heavily accented English in a recent interview Mr. Popovich talked about how selecting an eligible cat was the easy part, but he acknowledged that shelter playfulness did not always lead to a life under the lights. Still, “herding cats” is not a term that seems to apply to the Popovich family. Mr. Popovich’s parents were animal trainers in the former Soviet Union, and the family has had circus performers for four generations.

For his own animals, the training begins in the Popovich living room in Las Vegas. The family introduces them to the bright lights they will encounter before a live audience and play a CD simulating loud clapping. Newcomers are given basic roles — often just to sit onstage, without performing, until their tricks are learned.

“I don’t necessarily ‘teach’ a cat anything,” Mr. Popovich said. “I watch them for a while to see what they can do. Some are climbers. Others like to jump.”

His methods achieve fairly quick results. “It takes about six months to train a cat, and four to train a dog,” he said.

Even his best performers aren’t perfect. And just as most staged productions have understudies, Mr. Popovich has cats and dogs standing by onstage, ready at any moment to fill in for those who refuse to do a trick. (Maybe Broadway’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” can use a Popovich cat.)

And if the new cats “aren’t meant to be onstage, if they can’t be trained, I keep them anyways,” he said. “They don’t go back to the shelter.”

He is again on the lookout for kittens. So on his way through Manhattan he may just stop by a shelter or two.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 30 of the New York edition with the headline: His Work Is the Cat’s Meow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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