Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 12, 2018 0:47:05 GMT -5
Ah, the musical. The genre I'd spent so long defying until I finally realized...damn it, I like them. So, now, here we have The Greatest Showman: an original musical based on PT Barnum creating The Circus, a.k.a. The Greatest Show on Earth. And it's proven to be quite the crowd-pleaser, enjoying eight straight weekends in a row in the Box Office Top 5 and grossing $146 million to date domestically. So, naturally, the question is: is it worth it?
Bottom line, yes. Is it representative of the best the musical genre has to offer? No, not by a long shot, but it delivers on what it aims to be. And that is a sugary sweet, feel-good musical anyone can enjoy, and by gosh, does it do so with feeling! To be fair, whenever The Greatest Showman is filling the void in between musical numbers...it's fine, it's good...but when it's in musical mode, it's fantastic. In true musical fashion, the story feels more like it's there to serve the songs, but if you've come to accept that about the genre, then The Greatest Showman is going to satisfy you. From the opening - and closing - number The Greatest Show, to the rousing This Is Me, the moving Rewrite the Stars, Tightrope and From Now On, and also catchy The Other Side (among others), there's not a bad or boring tune from lyricists Ben Pajsek and Justin Paul. I, for one, haven't stopped listening to the soundtrack since I first got it.
Looking at the film from a more critical standpoint, though...I really do wish the regular, dialogue-driven bits of the story were meatier and more fleshed out. Conflict arises and is often solved relatively fast. And any ideas/themes brought up are dealt with on a very surface-level.
But...like the show it's portraying, The Greatest Showman has enough flash, flair, pizazz and just plain charm -- especially from its leading actors -- to get by. I do wish it was better, in terms of the story matching the musical numbers, but I'm not going to deny that I still got caught up in this thing.
***/****
I'm still listening to it pretty regularly.
