THE GREATEST SHOWMAN

[jo]

Translated from Italian by GOOGLE
#TheGreatestShowman the film with #HughJackman get on #Disney + from August 14th!


Will this be true to Disney+ around the world?


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I wonder it this is why Hugh posted this photo recently?

[jo]

The Greatest Showman...

in the time of the coronavirus ...

[jo]

[jo]

It took Disney a year or so before recognizing what great appeal the movie has. It is now on Disney +

There could not be more completely opposite roles for one actor than --

Wolverine vs The Greatest Showman!


Completely different level of competencies!


Add Prisoners and Bad Education ...and even Les Miserables --

and if that is not proof enough that Hugh Jackman is evolving as the actor with the widest range and versatility!


Jo

[jo]

We've seen this live -- the New York Times interview on the audience response as to why the movie held such an appeal... unfortunately, the clip does not play smoothly.

www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=10151522745559999&ref=watch_permalink

Can someone please fix the clip so we can watch the interview better?

Thanks for effort to improve its playability ( it has been acknowledged by the site that the clip is not playing well).


It does explain many of the continuing appeal of the movie. In yesterday's session with Deadline.com re the EMMY contenders, Pete Hammond told Hugh that THE GREATEST SHOWMAN has come up again as a very popular movie during the lockdown. It is interesting to recall what made audiences fall in love with it...and continue to do so!


Jo

[jo]

The article is more about what happened to Fox-type movies under the Disney umbrella...

but some great news about the release of The Greatest Showman on the Disney+ streaming service --


www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2020/08/17/greatest-showman-disney-debut-feels-like-the-final-nail-in-fox-coffin/#4c73e8b532ce

That the blockbuster Hugh Jackman musical P.T. Barnum biopic is the current top trending movie over at the Disney streaming platform isn’t a surprise. It has been hovering near the top of the various VOD lists (especially Amazon AMZN +1.1%) since the pandemic began, operating as the very definition of cinematic comfort food for families (and theater nerds) stuck indoors for months on end. But its arrival and Disney+ domination (for the moment) confirms something we’ve feared for a while...

The Greatest Showman closed Fox’s last good year on an ironic note. With mixed reviews by critics impressed by its songs but less impressed by its relatively thin story, became a word-of-mouth sensation among paying moviegoers. It would become the leggiest wide opener since Titanic ($184 million domestic from a $13.5 million Wed-Sun debut in December of 2017) and scored a best-selling soundtrack. It grossed $434 million worldwide on an $84 million budget alongside Sony’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle ($962 million) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($1.333 billion). This wasn’t some grimdark action thriller about apes taking over the world or a sleazy (in a good way) R-rated pulpy beach read, this was a PG-rated live-action musical that was pitched as, and embraced as, fun for the whole family. The Greatest Showman was a rare example in recent years of a studio making a successful Disney-style blockbuster.

It makes sense when you consider that Bob Iger’s 15-year (2005-2020) legacy as CEO was about acquiring already successful IP, mining existing Disney toons and making sure audiences associated them with the current Disney brand. Fox’s triumphs with Star Wars and Paramount PGRE -0.1%’s successes with Iron Man and Thor became the instruments of Disney’s domination.

Now we can add The Greatest Showman to the list. The real P.T. Barnum would have approved.

[jo]

Looked it up how it is doing on Amazon's PRIME VIDEO ( on demand) --

It has been rated ( together with DVD/BluRay releases) by close to 22,000 people - never heard that kind of review stats

www.amazon.com/Greatest-Showman-Hugh-Jackman/dp/B078HT6H7K/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=the+greatest+showman&qid=1597707157&s=instant-video&sr=1-2#customer-review-section

www.amazon.com/Greatest-Showman-Hugh-Jackman/dp/B078HT6H7K/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=the+greatest+showman&qid=1597707157&s=instant-video&sr=1-2

[jo]

[jo]

It annoys me when people simply throw unverified opinions to defend their positions --

In what place on earth was the movie overhyped??

It was actually treated unfairly!


Jo

[jo]

Also, weren't we complaining how they seemed to have put Hugh Jackman to the side, in favor of promoting the trapeze duo heavily ( posters/billboards). Except Hugh was the magnet when the movie came out!

Even now - kids do not ape the trapeze duo -- boys and girl kiddos like to pretend they are Barnum with tophat and cane, singing lustily ( or silently) to The Greatest Show.

Why do people like to put down others when they attain a great deal of success??

I particularly get irritated who thinks singing voices are the stars of musicals, alone!


Jo

[jo]

I meant SOLELY.

jO

[jo]

Sometimes I think it is pure jealousy because their favorites ( especially musical theatre actors) do not get the same level of adoration -- very far from it!

Hugh worked very hard for this project. Even then, he has been consistently humble in even receiving any accolades for it. And why should they be jealous of Hugh Jackman - he deserved every measure of success accorded to him!

Or do these people think Wolverine can never be a musical star. Not worthy in their eyes because he is only a movie star, and worse, a superhero actor


Jo

[jo]

[jo]

Fun dance workouts --

The Greatest Showman
Rewrite the Stars!

Looks like fun...easy ( for the slightly younger)...and makes you relive memories of the movie

[jo]

If you're not from the tropics -- those are harvested sugar canes



Jo

[jo]

The UK's continuing love affair with THE GREATEST SHOWMAN --

[jo]

It looks like Hugh is momentarily online --

[jo]

Reprinting it here --


The song FROM NOW ON inspires this musical number for the British Theatre SAVE THE ARTS Campaign.

The chorus "And we will come back home...home again!" and Hugh's singing towards the end are used to highlight their petition to the UK Government to support the British theatre industry!

Very powerful message of hope and resolve...

And like Barnum's resolve as an "anthem in my heart" - they are determined to see their beloved industry back on its feet!

Nov 1, 2020 16:39:39 GMT -5 jo said:

Cry...and lots of it --

as one views this powerful dance number to the music of FROM NOW ON ( Hugh Jackman's singing featured at the end) -

http://instagr.am/p/CHDP1jkHLu3

It is very heartwarming how people who provide the heart and soul of the theatre put up their petition to save their art!


Jo

[jo]

They did chose well to use this theme -

they even recreated the same energy and vibe from the movie, in a different context of course -- but still one of rebirth!

[jo]

[jo]

Loren Allred singing NEVER ENOUGH at David Foster's show --




Why wasn't she chosen to play the part?

She was singing the song, belting the notes, as if she was in an American Idol/The Voice contest.

She's also beautiful but lacked the regal poise of a very famous European opera diva ( which Rebecca Ferguson had loads of). The role was as much an acting job as well as being impressive with the singing, enough to mesmerize the audience and PTBarnum. Although I suspect his look of awe was more of the thought of being able to bring to his audiences a talent that will bring class to his show and the $$ opportunities such concerts may promise.

Jo

[jo]

Such a pleasure to read this spot-on review from Variety, as the movie seems to be the on the way to becoming a classic!

Variety


HOME
FILM
REVIEWS
Dec 20, 2017 12:01am PT
Film Review: ‘The Greatest Showman’
A wholesomely enraptured musical about the life of P.T. Barnum turns out to be a crowd-pleaser in the best sense: It's a concoction that soars.


By Owen Gleiberman

The Greatest Showman on Earth
Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
“The Greatest Showman” is a good old-fashioned cornball PG musical that is also a scintillatingly flashy — and woke! — immersion in up-to-the-minute razzmatazz. It takes the life of P.T. Barnum, the anything-goes circus impresario of the 1800s, who is played with irresistible effervescence by Hugh Jackman, and turns him into a saintly huckster-maestro who invented the spirit of modern showbiz by daring to follow his dream. At the same time, the film takes Barnum’s infamous believe-it-or-not attractions — Tom Thumb, Dog Boy, Tattoo Man, the Bearded Lady — and makes them over into sensitive enlightened outcasts, a kind of 19th-century freak-show gallery of identity politics.

How piously anachronistic is that? Very. Yet “The Greatest Showman” wants to give you a splashy good time, and does, and it’s got something that takes you by surprise: a genuine romantic spirit. The numbers are shot like electromagnetic dance-pop music videos, and to say that they sizzle with energy wouldn’t do them justice — they’re like a hypodermic shot of joy to the heart. You know you’re watching conventional chorus-line-with-a-beat flimflam, all decorating a tall tale, but that’s the ultra Hollywood pleasure of “The Greatest Showman.” It’s a biopic that forges its own uplifting mythology, and if you think back on it when it’s over and feel, maybe just a little bit, like you’ve been had — well, that’s part of its sleight-of-hand charm. P.T. Barnum would have been suckered by it, and would have approved.



The movie, shot with richly lacquered pizzazz by Seamus McGarvey, opens with a spectacular shot of Jackman’s Barnum, silhouetted under the rafters in his signature long coat and top hat, looking like as pure a creature of theatrical bravado as the M.C. in “Cabaret.” And though “The Greatest Showman” offers a much more family-friendly vision (this film about the sleazy bottom rungs of the entertainment world is one you could easily take young children to), it conjures the spirit of Bob Fosse — his imperious snap and verve — in the sexy precision of its choreography, and in its vision of a lowly circus that titillates and thrills because it demonstrates that all the world’s a stage.

The basic storyline, however, is tidy in its symmetries, made with a pleasing neo-traditional studio-system squareness. That first number, “The Greatest Show,” with its wild and primitive beat merging into a powerful hook, breaks off after about a minute, leaving us salivating for more stage ecstasy. The movie then flashes back to the 1820s, when Phineas Taylor Barnum is just a kid (played by Ellis Rubin, who suggests a hungry young Pete Townshend), traveling to rich people’s houses along with his tailor father, and watching the two of them get treated like the lowliest of servants. At the snobby home of the Halletts (Frederic Lehne and Kathryn Meisle), Phineas meets their daughter, Charity (Skylar Dunn), and the soaring duet “A Million Dreams,” with its creamy pristine harmonies, establishes “The Greatest Showman” as one of those movies in which a couple fall in love as children, and the enchanted innocence of their connection lets us know that that love will be forever.


Phineas grows up into P.T. Barnum (Jackman), who woos Charity (Michelle Williams) over the disdainful objections of her father. This sets up the essence of his motivation to become a showman: He wants to give Charity the life to which she’s accustomed — and, while he’s at it, to whip her father at his own game.

Barnum ekes out a living in a Dickensian shipping office, and when the company goes bankrupt, he’s got nothing to lose. The couple now has two daughters (Austyn Johnson and Cameron Seely), and Barnum’s fantasy is a kind of trifecta: He wants to fend for his family (he’s wounded at not being able to buy his girls ballet slippers), he wants to validate the love of the wife he lured into poverty — and he wants to do something that no one has done before: turn life, in all its gutbucket wonder, into a star attraction.

Jackman plays Barnum with a rapacious grin, his eyes twinkling with moonstruck pleasure. He wants the whole world to see what he sees, and a little more — he wants them to see the tawdry wonder of it. That will require a new kind of presentational daring, not to mention a little lying. Eagerly, with his eyes on the prize, Barnum lines up his fabulous freaks: a 500-pound man, who he will bill as a 750-pound man (why not?), dubbing him the Irish Giant (even though he’s Russian). A 22-year-old dwarf known as Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey), whom he dresses as Napoleon on a horse. And, of course, the most singular freak of all: Lettie Lutz (Keala Settle), the Bearded Lady. Barnum convinces these benighted folks to join his circus, housed in a building in Manhattan just as the city’s concrete grandeur is locking into place — the new world being constructed around horse-and-buggy paths. Barnum is already plugging into the notion that people are numb, jaded, overwhelmed. They need something to prod them to life.

The crowd, he says, will have a chance to behold the humanity of his freaks — and that’s true, in a sense, to what P.T. Barnum did. He dragged the strange and the deformed out of the closet (literally, in some cases), and forced his audience to confront their realness. Yet if you’re really going to get real about it, he was a master exploiter. This was not “My Left Foot;” he packaged his freaks as The Other — and “The Greatest Showman” turns Barnum, for all his carny capitalism, into the multiculti Mother Teresa of oddball showmanship. He really believes he’s doing it for their own good, and so does the movie.

Yet when Barnum’s attractions join together to sing and dance their eccentric asses off in the exhilarating chorus of “Come Alive” (“And you know you can’t go back again,/To the world that you were living in,/’Cause you’re dreaming with your eyes wide open”), the number sweeps you into its majestic syncopated flow, with its hint of gospel, its surge of melodic compassion. The songs were composed by the team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who wrote the lyrics for the songs in “La La Land,” and they’ve crafted rhythms and melodies that drive the movie — gorgeously — forward. When the Bearded Lady gets her own number, the inspirational rouser “This Is Me,” the scene is a pure-hearted epiphany. It’s enough to make you want to see “The Elephant Man” turned into a musical written by Lady Gaga.

The numbers in “The Greatest Showman” have a dance-pop fire that keeps you hooked, and that bursting-out quality recalls, at times, the spirit of “Moulin Rouge!” Yet “The Greatest Showman,” while it’s all but destined to become the crowd-pleaser of the holiday season (and, just possibly, a surprise awards contender), lacks the darkly audacious grandeur that made “Moulin Rouge!” a work of movie-musical art. The film’s conflicts have a storybook simplicity.

Barnum hires, as a right-hand man, a slumming rich-kid playwright, Phillip Caryle (Zac Efron), who’s got downscale showmanship in his blood. Phillip is quickly consumed by his love for the black trapeze artist Anne Wheeler (Zendaya), a clandestine passion that builds to the devotional duet “Rewrite the Stars,” a number literally — and spiritually — suspended in air. Efron and Zendaya have a terrific chemistry — they never stop seeking each other out. But it’s Barnum’s wandering eye that drives the film’s conflict.

During a visit to Queen Victoria, he meets the celebrated Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), and he’s captivated — by her voice, and her crystaline presence. On stage in America, kicking off the tour that Barnum leverages his empire to arrange (which really happened), Jenny, in ruby-red lipstick, sings “Never Enough” with an ecstatic solemnity that leaves you floored. The spectacular vocals are by “The Voice” alum Loren Allred, who with her rapturous cries of “Never! Never!” sounds like Adele ascending into the heavens. Has Barnum fallen in love? A little bit, yet he remains faithful to his wife. The real thing he’s fallen for is Jenny’s dream of upscale sublimity. So he begins to leave his freaks behind.

The director, Michael Gracey, is an Australian maker of commercials who has never directed a feature before, and he works with an exuberant sincerity that can’t be faked. “The Greatest Showman” is a concoction, the kind of film where all the pieces click into place, yet at an hour and 45 minutes it flies by, and the link it draws between P.T. Barnum and the spirit of today is more than hype. Barnum, in his carny-barker way, knows that everyone is a star; his appeal, as Jackman portrays him, is that he changes the world by getting the whole world to believe that. He really did invent the greatest show on earth. Until, of course, it was topped by something called Hollywood.

[jo]

www.nytimes.com/article/best-tv-shows-movies-disney-plus.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

The 50 Best TV Shows and Movies to Watch on Disney+ Right Now
The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel and more. These are our favorites.

By Scott Tobias
Nov. 20, 2020





The Greatest Showman’ (2017)
When it was first released in late 2017, this splashy tribute to P.T. Barnum opened to a middling box office and dismissive reviews, including one from Jason Zinoman, who called it “a montage sequence that occasionally turns into a movie musical.” But audiences turned it into a huge word-of-mouth hit, a reversal of fortune that is owed to its robust production, which recalls the historical pop of “Moulin Rouge,” and to a Benj Pasek and Justin Paul songbook that’s bursting with arena-ready numbers. Just don’t expect Hugh Jackman’s Barnum to bear more than a passing resemblance to the real guy.

Watch it on Disney +

[jo]

I didn't know that Ashley Wallen won the WORLD'S CHOREOGRAPHY AWARD ( dance's OSCAR) in 2018 for The Greatest Showman.

Choreography was one of the most appealing aspects of the film's musical genes. He did share the choreo with Daniel Cloud Campos ( The Other Side/Rewrite the Stars).

But in addition to being inspired by the songs, the dance numbers also inspired other artistic attempts in many parts of the world.

Somewhere in Asia, this near-athletic ( very!) interpretations of THE GREATEST SHOW and THIS IS ME --




Their energy leave you gasping

[njr]

^ Yes, she won!
worldchoreographyawards.com/#

Nancy