The Greatest Showman, the 2017 Hugh Jackman film with a chart-topping soundtrack, is to be staged in the West End next spring. After a sellout eight-week run at Bristol Hippodrome earlier this year, the Disney musical will arrive at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, currently home to Disney’s Hercules.
Its Bristol stars, Oliver Tompsett and Samantha Barks, will resume their respective roles as circus entrepreneur PT Barnum and his wife, Charity. Barks previously starred at Drury Lane as Elsa in Disney’s stage version of Frozen. Also returning from the Bristol production are Ben Joyce (as Barnum’s associate Phillip Carlyle), Vajèn van den Bosch (as opera singer Jenny Lind, known as the “Swedish nightingale”) and Malinda Parris (as the “bearded lady” Lettie Lutz).
The stage version includes This Is Me, Never Enough and all of the other songs from the film, composed by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. The duo have also written a handful of new songs. The production, which uses circus and magic tricks and features an aerial routine for Rewrite the Stars, follows roughly the same story as the screenplay – although in Bristol several of the “curiosities” recruited by Barnum for his ensemble differed from their screen equivalents. “We have created characters who are vulnerable and who represent the idea of otherness in a handful of different ways,” said Anne Quart, executive producer at Disney Theatrical Group, earlier this year.
Quart and her colleague Andrew Flatt described The Greatest Showman as “fearless in its emotion: open-hearted, exuberant and unapologetically joyous, celebrating those considered outsiders and dreamers”. The show has a book by Tim Federle and is directed by Casey Nicholaw (a Tony winner for The Book of Mormon).
Another musical inspired by The Greatest Showman, entitled Come Alive! after one of the film’s numbers, has been running at the Empress Museum in London for two years. Its plot is different to the film yet it features the original songs. Come Alive! is currently booking until spring.
