An original Musical about the life of P.T. Barnum? And the music for it was written by the same duo who composed the songs for La La Land? Sold! Wait, this same original musical has a screenwriting credit for Bill Condon? The guy who wrote only one good musical adaptation 15 years ago and nothing else of noteworthy timelessness? Oh no...

Oh no indeed, fair readers. The Greatest Showman. A musical about the life of one of the most spectacular ring-leaders of all time, whose eclectic style and ambitious vision is practically gift wrapped to become a musical, barely delivered if it delivered at all. Variety should not be a stranger to the songs, characters/character arches, or even the choreography. But it is. And to be honest, particularly as a musician (even an amateur musician), I felt a little insulted leaving the theatre for the thrown-out potential of this story.

The problem I have conveyed above stems from the biggest general folly of the musical, which is that it seems to believe that it must be dumbed down for the common man. As I read in the IMDB trivia section afterward, the idea for the music was to intentionally make it anachronistic thus audibly demonstrating how Barnum was ahead of his time. As a result, the songs sounded too much like re-hashed pop songs from five years ago and much too…what’s the word I’m looking for…cleaned up. I know that sounds odd but please hear me out, fair reader. Through most of the songs, I could hear the computer programs working their auto-tune or fixing the mistakes long before I could hear the bare bones of the songs themselves. Every number reminded me of the pop hits I used to skip over on my morning commutes. Just thinking about the Golden Globe nominated song “This is Me” makes me want to pull my hair out with annoyance. There was one song near the end that I legitimately thought had a good beat to it. The characters sounded more like a choir, and I could hear their boots stomping on the floor in rhythm. It sounded more on the natural side, which was a Godsend compared to the rest of the music in this film.
The Greatest Showman has the benefit of centering around a grand showman through a grand visual medium. And that same grand showman made his mark on the world by comprising a series of acts and people who were “unique”, even telling one of them “the people will be laughing anyway, so you might as well get paid for it”. That means that every single person in the show would have a singular backstory and talent. Yet the movie did not include any of those qualities. If I had to sit through a forced biracial love story that struggled under the adversity of 19^thcentury racism, then the least the movie could do is make the couple I’m supposed to root for stand out. If I had to hear the bearded lady sing about how she was not ashamed of herself, why did her voice sound like everyone else’s? Why couldn’t the performers in the movie help enhance each other rather than blend in? 

To add insult to the musical injury, none of the songs progressed their associated plot points to an earned resolution by the end. Every ethical dilemma a character needed to make came out of nowhere, then was fixed by two scenes later. By the time Barnum encountered marital problems (of course he would), in the very next scene he reconciled with his performers, they all sang an inspirational song (the only number I got a little into as singled out above), then he dramatically ran to earn the love of his wife back. That entire arch I just described took no time at all, so I as an audience member had no time to develop any attention to the problem therefore no investment in the resolution. To put it simply, I cared nothing for the characters or their problems because the film did not give them any purpose other than paint-by-numbers reasoning.

I have seen a ton of stage and screen musicals in my lifetime and I know that logically this is not the worst musical among them. But its lack of exploring to the full potential, its unoriginality, its predictable storyline, it all seemed to be constructed by a team of marketing agents who were dead set on annoying me personally. It got under my skin and I cannot recommend it without feeling as though I am insulting someone’s intelligence. I apologize for my harshness if you find that you like this movie, I just can’t get to a point where I even respect it right now. It seemed tailored to agitate me specifically.