‘Ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve waited for!” Nine years after Hugh Jackman first purred those opening words, silhouetted against a foot-stomping crowd, the inevitable has happened: The Greatest Showman is now a Disney stage musical. Despite derisive reviews, the 2017 film was a sleeper hit, powered by an anthem-packed soundtrack that included the Oscar-nominated paean to self-realisation and resilience This Is Me. It seemed written in the stars that those bangers would be rolled out in a live circus-theatre spectacular, and the production adds new songs by the original composers, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, whose musical Dear Evan Hansen made the opposite (but ill-fated) journey, from stage to screen.
Rather than launching in London or on Broadway as might be expected, The Greatest Showman is premiering in Bristol with an eight-week, sold-out run treated as a tryout. Its future is unconfirmed but it is worth noting that Theatre Royal Drury Lane, former London home to the mighty Frozen, will soon be vacant because Disney’s Hercules is closing in September.
When I arrive at Bristol’s handsome, Frank Matcham-designed Hippodrome, its warren of backstage rooms teems with activity. Major structural alterations have been made to fit the ambitious production in. The auditorium is full of monitors and control boards for technical rehearsals, presided over by director Casey Nicholaw (a Tony winner for The Book of Mormon) whose desk holds a Lego model of Winnie-the-Pooh, another Disney franchise. Passing by rails of waistcoats, jumbles of feathers and assorted power drills – plus a snack table that would feed a children’s party – I meet the stars in a dressing room.
Oliver Tompsett is taking the Jackman role – a sanitised version of real-life US entrepreneur PT Barnum – while Samantha Barks plays his wife, Charity. Barks, best known as Elsa in the West End Frozen, recently completed a solo tour performing in cathedrals (“There’s something so intimate about them, even though they’re grand and stunning”). In 2021, she sang The Greatest Showman’s power ballad Never Enough on her solo album. “My whole family adore the film,” Barks says. “There are not that many films where the kids get as much as the adults.”
Tompsett responded to the way the film portrays family. “My mum did amateur dramatics. I helped out in the costume room, ended up on stage, would roll up the flooring at the end. I come from a theatre family – on a small scale – and there is a sense of family in circus, where people can find a place.” The same could be said for the world of musical theatre, which is smaller than you might think, with fewer than six degrees of separation between stars. The Greatest Showman’s cast includes Vajèn van den Bosch, who played Frozen’s Elsa in the Netherlands, and Lorna Courtney who was briefly Tompsett’s co-star on Broadway in & Juliet. “Do you know what is lovely?” Barks says to Tompsett. “The only other time we worked together, the first time we met, we did a job for Disney.” She breaks out a few lines of the duet from Tangled that they performed at a one-off event.
The pair have been involved in the musical since its early workshops. The film was released by 20th Century Fox days after it was announced that the company would be acquired by Disney. Anne Quart, executive producer at Disney Theatrical Group, remembers discussions when the deal was done: “What titles are we going to have access to? This was by far the one with the most excitement around it.” Composers Pasek and Paul have been “absolutely central” to the show’s development, she says. “This isn’t a situation where they’re just sending in songs, like, ‘Hope it goes well!’ We learned that in a handful of places we needed music to tell a story, and then the boys wrote new songs. I think they feel like they could have been on the original album.”
The musical, with a book by Tim Federle, depicts Barnum turning a buck as a circus huckster and promoting a troupe of “unique persons and curiosities” to full audiences – and furious protests about his “freak show”. He is then dazzled by Swedish soprano Jenny Lind and becomes an opera impresario. Barnum is scorned by the upper classes yet longs to make it among the swells, away from the circus’s peanut shells, to paraphrase the irresistible duet The Other Side. The film makes much of this contrast between high and low art. In their careers as predominantly musical theatre performers, have Tompsett and Barks encountered any similar snobbery?
“We like to pigeonhole people in this country,” says Tompsett, who thinks sometimes you’re “not considered a real actor if you’re doing musical theatre”. But, he adds, such attitudes “drive me to go further”.
“Growing up, musical theatre wasn’t cool,” says Barks, who suggests that has now changed, highlighting the critical and commercial success of the Wicked films. We are speaking after Timothée Chalamet’s dismissive comments to the effect that no one cares about ballet and opera. Tompsett points out that snobbery can work both ways. “Chalamet trained in musical theatre when he was younger – he may have felt that people in opera and ballet looked down on what he was doing.” Tompsett has a little experience in straight plays: “All different art forms have their place in this world. But from my experience, trying to tell a decent story while having to break into song and dance every five minutes is the toughest.”
The elephant in the room is the real PT Barnum. When the film was released, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released a statement criticising it for romanticising “a person who exploited any living beings he could get his hands on”. Barnum’s acts included Joice Heth, an elderly disabled African American woman whom he falsely promoted as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. In his autobiography, he details paying $1,000 to become her “proprietor”, anticipating a “golden harvest” from exhibiting her, and even organising a public autopsy after she died in 1836.
Heth features in the 1980 bio-musical Barnum (a revival of which, led by Lee Mead, is now on tour) but she was omitted altogether from The Greatest Showman, which also changed the age of Charles Stratton, a performer with dwarfism whom Barnum gave the stage name General Tom Thumb. The real Stratton was recruited as a young child; the film makes him 22.
There is a distinct sense of tightrope-walking when we discuss the real Barnum. Does the stage musical delve any deeper into his exploitative behaviour? “The story’s very close to the film,” says Barks. “We’re trying to celebrate the world of circus and theatre and people’s differences,” adds Tompsett. “I think that’s the most important element that we’re doing here, rather than a witch-hunt on someone. Not to say that isn’t a valid discussion to have.”
Quart says: “You can’t argue the history, right? We’re not interested in suggesting that the history wasn’t what it was. That being said, the story we’re telling is really more of a fable based on the life of PT Barnum. We aren’t suggesting for a second that what we’re telling has historical accuracy.” Yet The Greatest Showman keeps Barnum’s name and many facts from his life. Quart says their storyline “holds our characters to account”, and that their Barnum “makes poor choices and puts himself and his ambition before the things that are truly important”. His redemption in the musical, she says, is hard won: “It was very important to us that it didn’t feel like an inevitable thing.”
There is a much knottier drama that could be made about Barnum, who has typically been portrayed on screen as canny and charismatic by stars including Burt Lancaster, Beau Bridges and Billy Zane. One counterpoint is the award-winning film I Didn’t See You There, by disabled film-maker Reid Davenport, who was born in Barnum’s home town of Bethel, Connecticut. His documentary, drawing on lived experience, gives a nuanced consideration of the rise and legacy of the “freak show” in the US.
The film of The Greatest Showman gave the role of Stratton to actor Sam Humphrey, who has skeletal dysplasia. He is among the circus ensemble – othered by Barnum as “the exotic and macabre” – who join together in their defiant anthem, This Is Me, to provide their perspective. Turning a real story of exploitation into an empowering musical left some of the film’s critics crying: “Humbug!” Has the stage production cast a performer with dwarfism? “We’ve made the choice not to do that,” says Quart. “We are in the early stages of our journey and I can’t speak to what this will become ultimately, but we have created characters who are vulnerable and who represent the idea of otherness in a handful of different ways.” She says the musical aims to show, to all audience members, that “the thing that makes you unique is actually your greatest power”.
It was only a year before The Greatest Showman’s release that the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey circus, formed from Barnum’s original company, finally phased out its 145-year tradition of performing elephants. The film used CGI animals yet still romanticised their role in the circus. “We have created a story where the animals are not part of the narrative,” says Quart. “I don’t think audiences are going to walk away thinking, ‘Gosh, I wish I saw an elephant.’”
The circus ensemble’s tricks will be designed “to serve the story”, such as an aerial sequence accompanying Rewrite the Stars, as in the film. (That song also accompanies a trapeze act in the circus show Come Alive! which has run in London since 2024 and sets Pasek and Paul’s soundtrack to a new storyline with different characters.) Nicholaw’s choreography is “athletic, aspirational and joyful” reports Quart, who says one of the joys of the process has been meeting artists and asking them about the stories they want to tell. Does that mean future Disney theatre productions may venture beyond its traditional adaptations? “We are deeply curious about the idea of bringing original stories to the stage,” she says.
I catch a run-through of one new song, which finds Tompsett dodging hammers juggled around him. The band are situated in a “sky pit” above the stage, which is designed as half a circus ring, with its own balcony level, and uses sophisticated digital technology. “It’s like we’re trying to land on the moon,” says Tompsett. “The operation on this job is unlike anything I have ever experienced.”
Audiences already know these songs inside out and, at the film’s sing along screenings, some will have belted out the lyrics. How do the team feel about theatregoers joining in, from that super-stretched opening “Whoa!” onwards? “Is it our hope that the audience sings along?” asks Quart. “No. Do I think people may get carried away? I don’t know. We’re going to find out!”
The Greatest Showman is at Bristol Hippodrome until 10 May
