EXCLUSIVE: The stage adaptation of musical film The Greatest Showman, which starred Hugh Jackman portraying the early lifetime of entertainer P.T. Barnum, can have its world premiere within the British West Nation metropolis of Bristol, round March 2026, forward of its launch within the West End and on Broadway.
Filled with unique beasts, bearded girls, strapping big robust males and dare-devil acrobats, together with the likes of Zendaya, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson and Zac Efron, the twentieth Century movie grossed $459M worldwide.
However, it’s truthful to say, that audiences went giddy over the songs and the movie’s embrace of its disparate characters who bonded as a household, slightly than its storyline.
Songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who received a Golden Globe and a Grammy and obtained an Oscar-nomination for the 2017 movie’s pop traditional “This Is Me”, have written an extra 5 new songs to enhance the hits they penned for the image directed by Michael Gracey.
These numbers embrace “All The Ones You Love,” Anne Quart, Disney Theatrical Group’s government producer, assures me.
“The entire songs that persons are enthusiastic about are all within the present,” she guarantees as she begins to tick them off one after the other. There’s “The Best Present”, “A Million Desires”, “Come Alive”, “The Different Aspect”, “Rewrite the Stars”, “Tightrope” and “From Now On”.
One of many new Pasek and Paul songs, which I’ve listened to, is a rousing, rallying anthem known as “Present Goes On”, which is able to deliver the curtain down on the finish of act one.
The Best Showman Disney Theatrical Group
Lauded director Casey Nicholaw, who received Tony Awards for his route of The Guide of Mormon, and for his choreography on Some Like It Scorching, has been given the duty by Disney Theatrical Group, led by managing director Andrew Flatt, Quart and Chief Artistic Officer Thomas Schumacher, to inject his famend show-stopping brio into the guts of The Best Showman. He’ll direct and choreograph. Guide is by Tim Federle (Excessive Faculty Musical: The Musical: The Sequence, Excessive Faculty Musical: The Musical: Vacation Particular).
The present is being produced by Disney Theatrical and The Seelig Group, a producer of the film. It’s the primary twentieth Century title to be tailored by Disney for the stage. The creatives have spent months fine-tuning the fabric. They held an in depth workshop in London final fall.
Quart confirms the constructive buzz I used to be listening to. “It was a kind of areas the place you felt that factor, you’re feeling when one thing particular has occurred,” she says. “And it was very a lot an indicator for us that actually we’ve got infinite notes and work to do and chopping a track and eradicating a scene and all of the issues, however the bones are proper and the construction’s good. So we’re feeling very hopeful.”
The Best Showman will rehearse from late December or very early January after which head to the Bristol Hippodrome, a favorite tryout venue for Disney Theatrical ventures, the place it’s going to have its world premiere in March-ish. No official date has been set. I’ve it on the authority of Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose LW Theatres group controls the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, that there’s an settlement in place for The Best Showman to go there after its tryout in Bristol.
Casting for principal roles is effectively underway. Jackman, for starters, won’t be reprising his display function as Barnum.
Nevertheless, I used to be interested in Keala Settle who will without end be related to the mammoth chart-topping “That is Me”. I keep in mind her electrifying efficiency introduced the home down on the Oscars.
The actress typically works in London, and performs the interfering Miss. Coddle, the Head Shiztress of Shiz College within the Depraved film. I pressed Quart about whether or not Settle or anybody from the movie can be within the present.
She felt this could be unlikely. Nevertheless, she clarified: “Look, we haven’t completed casting, so it’s exhausting. I can’t say something for positive. However it isn’t our intention that anybody from the movie shall be within the musical.”
Key casting has been ongoing for six months and it strikes up a part imminently with open auditions kicking off this month and subsequent, in Dublin, Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Exeter, Newcastle and London.
“We’re legitimately actually in search of surprising expertise and individuals who, maybe perhaps haven’t been your musical theater child who’ve gone via the standard format, however individuals who have a present that they perhaps solely shared with their bathe or their college choir or their church or one thing. I’m hoping that we discover some actually distinctive, extraordinary people,” Quart says whereas additionally noting that it’s the manufacturing’s intention to solid UK expertise.
There are not any model new characters however Quart tells me that “we could also be presenting characters from the movie in a barely completely different manner,” ensuring, as an example, that Charity, Barnum’s spouse, performed within the movie by Michelle Williams, has company. In contrast to the movie, the place she was thinly sketched, the character within the stage manufacturing “will have a correct arc,” Quart says.
Zendaya. Picture: Marc Piasecki/WireImage
In spite of everything, Quart provides, “she’s married to an advanced man who’s a visionary, but additionally can’t pay the hire. And what’s the nuance of that like?”
And the creatives have ensured, says Quart, that the opposite key feminine character, Anne Wheeler, the younger girl Zendaya performed within the movie, “has actual house and a narrative to inform.“
The songs from the film have had actually billions of performs on Spotify and different streamers.
“And I feel the factor about this music that’s extraordinary is that everyone has personalised it,” Quart notes.
“Individuals are operating and exercising to ‘This Is Me’. Individuals are enjoying ‘Best Present’ whereas they clear their flats. I feel regardless of who I speak to, it’s actually private. And so in contemplating whether or not or not it’s worthy of turning it right into a musical, it grew to become about individuals’s connection to the music and the power to create one thing that’s joyful and aspirational, however that may break your coronary heart and likewise offer you all of the songs you like.”
“We’re making an attempt to construct a musical that may be very human and really a lot about discovered household and about shedding your self and coming again to your self in the long run,” Quart provides.
My private benchmark for Disney stage musicals has at all times been The Lion King. Julie Taymor took the substances from the primary animated film, plus the songs by Elton John and Tim Rice and turned it right into a theatrical murals, and from all the things I’m listening to my sense is that’s what Nicholaw, Federle, Pasack, Paul and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire and the Disney musical brass are endeavor right here.
“How do you inform the story of the parable of Barnum, this man who actually is sophisticated, however in our musical, this man who has a drive and a ardour to entertain individuals, however looks like he isn’t entitled to have that form of house in life,” Quart says.
The movie’s director Gracey tells me that he has no involvement with the present. He appeared a little bit down after we spoke about it, however he feels that the present’s in good palms.
“Properly, initially, Michael and I had a while collectively and he got here and sat with me within the workplace, and I actually needed to listen to in regards to the story of how the movie got here to be and the issues that they struggled with. So actually we’ve had conversations with Michael,” Quart says.
Whereas showering reward on the “enormously gifted” Mr. Gracey, Quart was clear-eyed about who and what the manufacturing requires.
“We’re making a musical for the stage, and so we put collectively a staff of people that we felt have been skilled at doing that. And so it wasn’t about: ‘not the film individuals’, as a lot as leaning into Casey who clearly has an unlimited expertise in terms of each delivering coronary heart and comedy, which each and every musical wants a little bit little bit of, in addition to form of superb present buying numbers. There’s form of no one higher,” Quart says.
“Our solely job proper now could be to make an awesome present, that’s the solely factor we’ve got to do. Our first plan is to make it nice after which in fact, if we’re ready to achieve that, we’ll ultimately need it to be within the West Finish and we would like it to be in New York, and I hope in lots of, many different locations,” Quart provides.
Ideas will quickly flip as to whether The Best Showman transfers to Drury Lane.
Now, I gotta be clear, this can not occur till after what’s hoped shall be a profitable run of the Disney musical Hercules that opens on the Drury this June. Nicholaw can also be directing and choreographing Hercules with rehearsals starting in April.
Quart wouldn’t touch upon that nugget of data.
“We’re not getting forward over our skis by way of planning till we’ve got landed the primary airplane which is to make it nice,” she reiterates.
My calculation is that The Best Showman wouldn’t be within the Drury Lane any sooner than the top of 2026, however then there’s additionally the slim risk that it might go to Broadway first and then take over the Drury Lane.
To start with, let’s see how robust Hercules is, proper?
