Based on the dark sideshows of Coney Island's amusement parks in the early part of the 20th century, Steven Kazuo Takasugi's Sideshow is a work of music theatre framed in a chamber music performance suggesting a circus sideshow (freak show). The work is a meditation on virtuosity, freak shows, entertainment, spectacle, business and the sacrifices one makes to survive in the world. A cycle of six aphorisms by the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936) is embedded as a subtext running through the work.