THE GREATEST SHOWMAN : Publicity and Promotion

[jo]

Don't miss this -- definitely not

941zbq.iheart.com/featured/elizabethany/content/2018-02-20-exposed-keala-settlethe-greatest-showmans-this-is-me/


Podcast with Keala --

*About herself and THIS IS ME

*Her unique relationship with Hugh...and how ThE GREATEST SHOWMAN is such a unique passion project with Hugh

*Something she said : "Everyone had something to offer, in his/her own individual way!". It is something that also came to me - that each of the major and key supporting cast was unique and made his/her own contribution to this movie!

[jo]

Keala singing THIS IS ME at Ellen's show --

[jo]

A long interview by PeopleTV's Jess Cagle --

people.com/peopletv/video/bs/00000160-7199-df90-a7e0-759df2b40000/hugh-jackman/


It's close to 45 minutes long, but it stops playing after the 30th minute. Maybe they will fix the glitch eventually.


Jo

[jo]

What it meant to Zendaya and Hugh when they were filming their respective songs --

www.wahpetondailynews.com/national/entertainment/zendaya-thinks-live-version-of-greatest-showman-will-sound-terrible/article_9779cd59-5e2f-5553-a993-d51c0bec9d69.html


Zendaya's experience relative to the actual filming was very different and almost laughable ( something to do with the trapeze act).

Speaking on 'Side by Side' on Amazon Music, Zendaya said: "When you see it visually come together it was a fun thing to shoot - but I really don't want to hear the live recording of us whilst we're swinging in the air, singing the song because we sound terrible!

"We're slamming into each other and running around, that's not the version you want to hear!

"But when you put the version we recorded with the visual of the movie, it's really beautiful - and the fact that's all in the air is a bit of a metaphor the whole idea of being wrapped up in the stars and in your fantasy of what you think could be possible."

Hugh, on the other hand, was touched immensely by the message of FROM NOW ON.

... Hugh Jackman, who admitted it was hard for him to sing 'From Now On' without crying.

He said: "It was really difficult for me to get through [recording] this without crying. Sometimes as an actor you hope you get the emotion on the day, my worry on this song was I hope I'll be able to sign the song because it's such a beautifully written song, another anthem of someone who's made a mistake but is even a glimmer of hope of a second chance by friends, who give him a second chance he might not even deserve.

"To me that theme I find very moving and the whole song is so beautiful, but it just immediately touched me in my heart."

[jo]

[jo]

The online edition of this pre-release feature article on Hugh Jackman from the pink/peach newspaper ( the venerable THE FINANCIAL TIMES of London) came up only now with its social media link



www.ft.com/content/eb7c824c-e031-11e7-a0d4-0944c5f49e46

Hugh Jackman: every bit the showman
The actor talks about honing his skills for The Greatest Showman, his new musical about circus impresario PT Barnum


James Mottram
December 22, 2017

Hugh Jackman is recalling a professional low point: his days entertaining kids’ parties dressed as a clown. “I can tell you — an eight-year-old’s birthday party is the toughest audience I’ve ever had to face,” he says. One day, after a disgruntled child yelled out “This clown is crap”, Jackman produced a carton of eggs in desperation. “I just gave them the eggs and let them chuck ’em at me!” He smiles. “I really didn’t have any skills. I was very Barnum-esque.

”In some ways he still is. Jackman plays PT Barnum, the 19th-century circus impresario, in The Greatest Showman. A glitzy movie musical with original songs written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who won an Oscar for their work on La La Land, it’s the perfect showcase for Jackman. (Both he and the film have been nominated for Golden Globe Awards.) The genial Australian may be best known for playing the mutant superhero Wolverine in the X-Men films, but showmanship is a skill he has acquired and honed since those clowning days.Indeed, when The Greatest Showman closes with Barnum’s words “The noblest art is that of making others happy”, it’s a quote easily attributable to Jackman.

“He totally has that showman quality,” says Michael Gracey, director of the film. “There’s a real magnetic quality that he possesses.” And courage too; not many A-list stars in recent years have had the chutzpah to host the Oscars solo, as he did in 2009. “I’m not quite Barnum,” he says, “but I just thought: ‘Just do it, just have a go.’ ”Of course there are also big differences between subject and star. Even before co-founding the world-famous Barnum & Bailey Circus, Barnum was a masterful businessman — “the Steve Jobs of his day”, says Jackman — and he understood the need for marketing. But his personal life was drenched in scandal. “He had a disaffected kid who ended up selling a story, really bad stories about infidelity,” says Jackman. “Suffice it to say, we don’t really get into that.”

Now 49, Jackman — looking trim in a pale shirt and black trousers, when we meet in London’s Claridge’s Hotel — is happily scandal-free. He’s been married to his actress wife Deborra-Lee Furness for 21 years, and together they have two adopted children, Oscar, 17, and Ava, 12. But what he does share with Barnum is a belief in “connecting with an audience and making audiences feel that it’s special, [that] it’s not just another night.”The actor as PT Barnum.


It was just after Jackman’s successful fronting of the Academy Awards that the idea was floated of a Barnum musical. After singing on stage in Oklahoma!, his one-man show Back on Broadway and his Tony-winning turn as songwriter Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, the actor was enthused. But a box-fresh musical, not road-tested on Broadway, was anything but easy. “It’s the hardest thing to do, without a doubt, in showbiz,” Jackman admits. “There are so many elements to get right.”When it comes to original movie musicals, the track record is hardly spotless, whether it’s Francis Ford Coppola’s costly flop One from the Heart (1982) or James L Brooks’s I’ll Do Anything (1994), which had all its musical numbers cut after negative previews. But Jackman was determined; over the eight-year development cycle, he read 37 books on Barnum and he comes to the interview armed with anecdotes about Barnum’s tough childhood, his infamous hoaxes and his uncanny mathematical skills.

With a budget of $84m and a further $100m set aside for marketing, the film, which also stars Michelle Williams, Zac Efron and rising star Zendaya, is a big risk for backers Twentieth Century Fox. Despite the studio’s cast-iron relationship with Jackman, forged through his lucrative performances as Wolverine, a character he brought to a close with this year’s splendid Logan, he’s aware that a musical with no recognition factor is a tough sell. “I’m a realist . . . it’s probably my only shot,” says Jackman. “If it works, I’ll probably get a couple more.”Fortunately, since the success of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 jukebox musical Moulin Rouge! the market has been more amenable to the form. “Baz broke that perception that they could actually be commercial and cool,” Jackman adds. Chicago won Best Picture at the 2003 Oscars and Les Misérables grossed $441m worldwide in 2012. That film, adapted from the Boublil and Schönberg musical, starred Jackman and won him a Golden Globe and the only Academy Award nomination of his career to date, playing the bread-stealing Jean Valjean.

At that point, The Greatest Showman was still embryonic. With Gracey and his star keen to fill it with a contemporary sound (“Barnum wouldn’t want it to feel like a museum piece,” says Jackman) the songwriting talents of musicians Bruno Mars and Pharrell Williams were sought before Pasek and Paul signed on, thanks to a little Barnum-like bending of the truth. “We had to tell a fib to the studio about how much they’d done,” says Jackman. “Michael Gracey told them they’d won a Tony — which they hadn’t.” They made up for it earlier this year, winning Best Original Score for Dear Evan Hansen.

Jackman, however, was exposed to a different kind of showmanship as a child in Sydney, where he was raised by parents who had emigrated from England in 1967. His accountant-father Christopher is a born-again Christian who was converted by American preacher Billy Graham, and used to take Jackman to Christian revivals. “I remember when I was 14, 15, going to one of those and having a very strong feeling that I was going to be up on that stage at some point.


Calm but very certain.”As prophetic as that proved, Jackman has gone far beyond that. He has spent the autumn shooting The Front Runner, a film that chronicles the rise and fall of former US Senator Gary Hart. Presum­ably a less fanciful biopic than The Greatest Showman, it’s a fascinating move for an actor who has much greater dramatic range than Hollywood often seems to appreciate (see his obsessive magician in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige or his distraught, vengeful father in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners).


For the moment, his heart is set on seeing Showman hit big. “If this works, I’d love to do it on stage too,” he says, suggesting using puppetry for the circus animals. It’s an imaginative idea: perhaps a little of Barnum has rubbed off on Jackman? “He had a lot more confidence than me,” the actor says. “I have some ideas I think that are different, but for a long time I didn’t trust them as much as he trusted himself. I would love to be more like him in many ways, but I’m also happy to be me.” He pauses. “I prefer to be me.”

‘The Greatest Showman’ is out now in the US and opens in the UK on December 26.


Copyright
The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.

Okay --

“If this works, I’d love to do it on stage too,” he says, suggesting using puppetry for the circus animals.

It has proven to be a big, big success with audiences! So, everyone who wants a crack at the role -- you'll all have to wait until Hugh gives up the role, if it does get adapted for Broadway

Animal puppetry -- shades of LION KING and WAR HORSE!

Jo

[jo]

[jo]

I am not sure if this new magazine feature on Hugh has still something to do with The Greatest Showman, but here it is --

[jo]

Mar 6, 2018 7:30:59 GMT -5 jo said:

I am not sure if this new magazine feature on Hugh has still something to do with The Greatest Showman, but here it is --

[jo]

Auction of replica costumes --


latfusa.com/article/2018/3/fox-auctions-costume-replicas-from-the-greatest/

[jo]

Official Page from Fox on the auction of replica costumes and how the auction is coming along --

auctions.fox.com/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=FBFXMGSHAUC1

[jo]

I wonder what the late publicity blitz is for ?

To promote the release of the movie on DIGITAL, DVD and BLURAY?

[jo]

Here's Keala on the TODAY show --

www.broadwayworld.com/videoplay/VIDEO-Watch-Keala-Settle-Perform-THE-GREATEST-SHOWMAN-Anthem-THIS-IS-ME-Live-on-TODAY-20180312

Nothing much about the movie except in the intro ( and Keala saying she was initially scared to tackle the song). But it keeps the movie and the soundtrack album in the minds of people. Also, it is an irony that it was THIS IS ME which was featured as musical entertainment in the show...while not too many seemed to have remembered an Oscar-winning song.

[njr]

Keala sang This Is Me on The Graham Norton Show on BBC America on Fri. Mar. 2nd. Just watched it on DVR as I was on vacation then. She brought the house down!

Nancy

[jo]

The New York Post published an article on the real Barnum, before THE GREATEST SHOWMAN was released.

nypost.com/2017/12/16/how-p-t-barnum-pulled-off-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-hoaxes/


It's very interesting reading - as it shows how irrepressible a personality Barnum was when it comes to putting up various mass entertainment attractions. Some of the things we saw in the movie were really inspired by some of the events ( like the fire...and the immense publicity he created for Jenny Lind's intro to America even if he had not heard her sing before ) and the many ways which Barnum did put up to attract people to his museum.

[jo]

Another way to enjoy the screening of THE GREATEST SHOWMAN --

on the grounds of one of England's famous stately homes ( aka castles)

It's set for late summer!


I've been to a concert on the grounds of a big castle somewhere in southern England. It's unbelievable what some people brought for the picnic fare... and some even brought candelabra and champagne

But this must be great fun as it is a sing-along screening!




PS: Guess what --

Boughton House - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boughton_House

Boughton House is a country house about 3 miles (4.8 km) north-east of Kettering off the A422 road near Geddington in Northamptonshire, England. Part of an estate of 11,000 acres, it is one of the seats of the Duke of Buccleuch, and famed for its beauty, its collections, and the fact it has survived virtually unchanged since ...

If the name of the stately home sounds very familiar -- it is because it was a filming location for LES MISERABLES. It was the home of Marius's family and the place where the wedding of Cosette and Marius took place! *Grin*

www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Miserables.html#.WqqzxExuLg8

Les Misérables location: the family estate of Marius: Boughton House, Kettering, Northampton

Photograph: Boughton House

Saved from the failed rebellion by Valjean, Marius (Eddie Redmayne) returns to marry Cosette in the ‘Pontmercy’ estate. His family home is Boughton House, actually the residence of the Duke of Buccleuch, just northeast of Kettering in Northamptonshire.

It’s fitting that the mansion represents a ‘French’ estate. It’s the work of Ralph Montagu, the 1st Duke of Montagu, a former English ambassador to France, and a passionate builder and patron of the arts. Boughton represents his dream of bringing French beauty and style to the English landscape and, in fact, has been dubbed the ‘English Versailles’.

Jo

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/Bgg1HLuDoFK

[jo]

Did he go to another theater with another sing-along screening ?

[jo]

[jo]

Bigger screen and presumably better audio ?


www.facebook.com/nytimes/videos/vl.1367698343355668/10151522745559999/?type=1

[jo]

Sing-along, anyone

http://instagram.com/p/BgmEAFDjwsc

Maybe this is a way to push an extension of the theatrical run, now that the Digital format has been released?

[jo]

Fox itself uploads these scenes from the movie showing part of THE GREATEST SHOW and A MILLION DREAMS, as a come-on for the release of the home video --

[jo]

At the London cinema where he greeted the unsuspecting movie audience for a sing-along screening!

[jo]

The sing-alongs continue in central London ( a few minutes walk from Leicester Square where movie premieres are held) --

[jo]