The Greatest Showman’s first trailer shows off a weird musical biopic combo

I’m pretty sure that there are many, many issues not represented in the upcoming The Greatest Showman, a biopic and musical about P.T. Barnum and his famous circus. There’s probably a lot of stuff about exploitation and shaming that this movie is not going to dive into at all. It’s bit hard to care, though.

I’m all for factually accurate biopics, but this is clearly a musical, and as musicals go I’m glad they’re taking the more toe-tapping approach. It looks like they’ll spin the circus into a story about acceptance, not ostracizing, and fill it with amazing dance numbers and catchy tunes. P.T. Barnum was not a good man all the time, but if we’re making a circus musical about his life I’ think focusing on his qualities is OK here.

Music wise the song playing definitely falls in the cheesy category, but it’s good enough to hit the right strings. With Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who won the Tony for Best Musical for Dear Evan Hansen very recently, I can’t see the songs failing overall.