Superb Movie./ Show on All Levels

Rating: 9/10 (1 February 2018)

The story here of PT Barnum is done in a daring musical here, and in the real spirit of the great showman, it works. The point of the greatest showmans life is the show. This movie brings this spirit into the telling of the story perfectly. Jenny Bicks story adaptation to the screen is a greatly paced masterpiece.
The lyrics for the music here are from the same folks who did La La Land, but this music soundtrack leaves that movie in the dust. This is the best musical I have seen in a long time. The mixture of dialogue to musical is perfect. Hugh Jackman is fabulous in the Barnum role. I never saw the live Broadway show Barnum years back, so I am not sure if the film owes anything to that.
I fell in love with Zendaya, playing the Anne Wheeler aerial role. She actually rises to the top of the Co-Starring roles, even though her role was not intended to be a main role. Michelle Williams /Charity Barnum role starts off well, but fades later in the film. She is good, but suffers a bit from lack of script in the last 20 minutes of the film.
Zac Efrons/ Phillip Carlyle is excellent acting, and his scenes with Zendaya are electricity in a bottle. The film does get a couple of excellent messages about the society Barnum existed in. The first of these is about the New York City rich elite snobs. These folks really did exist, and in some cases still do. It took the television era to actually get through these walls put up by these puffed up egotistic people. The second is about how Barnum in his shows took down these walls and accepted everyone because he did not start as one of these snobs. His sole purpose was to be the Greatest Showman.
Sometimes Barnum almost certainly, as this story suggests, lost sight of everyone and everything around him trying to promote himself. That is one of the best things this story/movie captures. This is truly, the spirit of Barnum.