Synopsis
Inspired by the imagination of Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Greatest Showman is an original musical that celebrates the birth of show business and tells of a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation.
Inspired by the imagination of Phineas Taylor Barnum, The Greatest Showman is an original musical that celebrates the birth of show business and tells of a visionary who rose from nothing to create a spectacle that became a worldwide sensation.
The life and work of Phineas Taylor Barnum get Broadway razzle-dazzle and sentiment in this occasionally rousing, visually smooth, emotionally diluted musical, set in nineteenth-century New York.
Phineas Taylor (Hugh Jackman), a tailor’s son, and Charity Hallett (Michelle Williams), a socialite’s daughter, are unlikely childhood friends who marry. They have two daughters and are poor and happy, but Phineas Taylor has big dreams, and he borrows and schemes to realize them. His circus displays human curiosities who are callously called freaks by his critics (including a snooty theatre reviewer, played by Paul Sparks) but whose humanity and dignity his show brings to light. The impresario’s confrontations with public hostility, financial difficulties, and romantic misunderstandings form the core of the plot, but another crucial strand involves his high-society business partner, the playwright Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron), who defies his own family and the conventions of the time by pursuing a romantic relationship with one of the company’s trapeze artists, Anne Wheeler (Zendaya), a black woman. (What Anne’s brother, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, thinks of the relationship is never specified.) The director, Michael Gracey, delivers quick doses of excitement in splashy scenes but has little feel for the choreographic action, offers scant historical substance, and displays slender dramatic insight.
Barnum was a fascinating and complex individual, a man who championed abolitionism and served as a reasonably competent politician in his later years but made his fortune through schemes that mislead paying audiences about what he was displaying and exploited the physical difference of so-called “freaks.” He was a philanthropist who always insisted on making a buck off of his charitable works if possible, a huckster who was beloved by those who knew him well, a charlatan entertainer who tried to debunk spiritualists and others whose deceptions he considered morally worse than his own.