In the early 20th century, my north Jersey hometown was briefly the winter headquarters of the Ringling Bros’ circus, a fact that added no small amount of color to the local lore. As a child growing up in the area over half a century later, I delighted in imagining what it must have been like when they brought the menagerie from the train station to the custom-built stone barns intended to house them. And although they did not avail themselves of it, my parents’ house deed included a proviso outlining their right to keep exotic animals on the property. Despite this nostalgic connection to all things circus-related, I somehow missed seeing or even hearing about the 2017 musical The Greatest Showman until a dear friend suggested we watch it with our children one evening this winter.
Whoa.
Ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for…
And buried in your bones there’s an ache that you can’t ignore.
The Greatest Showman has now taken over as the soundtrack of our home. My three children—ages 8, 11, and 14—are continually engaged in an energetic re-creation of the dramatic full-cast dance-acrobatic-fire-eating-juggling routine, and the chandelier in our foyer is jangling with every reverberation of their rhythmic stomping (and sometimes with the harder thud of an unplanned tumble). They are, in their own minds, the stars of the show:
Colossal we come these renegades in the ring
When the lost get found and we crown ’em the circus kings…It’s blindin’, outshining anything that you know
Just surrender ’cause you’re comin’ and you wanna goWhere it’s covered in all the colored lights…
Impossible comes true, intoxicatin’ you
Oh, this is the greatest showIt’s everything you ever want
It’s everything you ever need
And it’s here right in front of you
This is where you want to be
Beyond the brilliantly infectious and joyful rhymes of the soundtrack, or the excitement of the circus ring with all its drama, what has truly captured our hearts about the movie are the ways in which it so unexpectedly glorifies the ordinary things of family, home, and hard work.
You might expect (as I did) that a show largely featuring the original circus “freaks” would be relentlessly individualistic, glorying in nonconformity and outsider status to the detriment if not outright demonization of “polite” society and middle-class mores. Yet Phineas Taylor Barnum, the eponymous “greatest showman,” is presented (more or less factually, although the movie doesn’t follow history in every particular) as motivated by his love not merely of the limelight but for his (eventual) wife, Charity, and in time their daughters. Hugh Jackman shines as Barnum, deftly portraying him with an irrepressible spirit and charm. He avoids becoming a caricature by also conveying Barnum’s profoundly earnest desire to make something of himself that will simultaneously make the world a better place. While Jackman’s Barnum is always striving, Michelle Williams portrays Charity Barnum as implacable and thus the perfect foil to her husband—she is the calm eye around which the whirlwind of his creativity and ambition revolve.
Barnum and Charity’s love story unfolds onscreen in a montage of scenes that captures some of the “million dreams” they share together. (Poignantly, the two are separated for a period when Charity’s prosperous parents attempt to abort the budding romance, and their song takes on an epistolary air as they describe the world they hope to make together.)
Barnum’s dreams are wildly beyond his social standing, and in choosing to marry him, Charity willingly gives up the privileges she’s enjoyed as a member of the elite. Though born to wealth and respectability, she does not consider these worth more than the man who has won her heart.
Barnum and Charity begin their married life with all the enthusiasm of young lovers, and their spirits are not dimmed by the difficulties of their circumstances, for their eyes are not turned solely upon themselves but toward the challenges they hope to overcome.
Barnum begins married life respectably employed as a clerk of some sort in a large firm, working long hours doing what appears to be a job ill-suited to his storyteller’s heart. Meanwhile, our upper-class princess Charity brings in laundry to help make ends meet, as the rooftop of their tenement is transformed into a veritable forest of sheets hung from seemingly endless yards of clothesline. And although the work is mundane and the living conditions a far cry from the wild imaginings of the two dreamers, their home is full of warmth and wonder. We believe Charity when she sings:
However big, however small,
Let me be a part of it all.
Share your dreams with me…
Barnum, of course, cannot remain a simple clerk forever, and it’s the tension between this domestic dream and the demands of his more grandiose redemptive vision of what it might be possible to achieve with his extraordinary talents for storytelling that sets the narrative in motion. Things move quickly through Barnum’s struggles to attract visitors to the American Museum, his (mostly) respectable collection of the great and amazing wonders of the human and natural world. The problem with these exhibits, one of his daughters points out, is that they are lifeless—stuffed and sterile specimens of things that once had power over the imagination but are now merely relics. What Barnum needs to show his audience is nothing short of life itself.
And thus, the museum turns into a circus.
The bearded lady, the “dog man,” and General Tom Thumb are merely the most extraordinary of Barnum’s “curiosities”: Other “sensational acts” include the world’s heaviest man, what appears to be a set of Siamese twins, a towering “Irish Giant” (really a Russian), and a pair of (gasp!) black acrobats. Each in their own way breaks the curve of the average human condition and in their exceptionality experiences the extreme loneliness of the outcast who is safe only in the shadows—until Barnum collects them into his troupe. He recognizes something in each of them that is special and beautiful and helps them see what is good in one another. They become a family bonded by the desire to delight and surprise audiences.
There they come together and face the spotlight:
We are bursting through the barricades and
Reaching for the sun (we are warriors)
Yeah, that’s what we’ve become (yeah, that’s what we’ve become)
I won’t let them break me down to dust
I know that there’s a place for us
For we are glorious
And they are! The sights and sounds of the show are electrifying and empowering rather than exploitative, for gathered together on the stage as an ensemble we see not the individually freakish but rather a conglomerate of the wondrously unfathomable depths of the God who created each person shown, beautifully and uniquely in His own image.
This God is, as Acts 10:34 tells us, “no respecter of persons”: He cares not for the rules and regulations that men lay upon one another in attempts to separate the righteous from the unrighteous. Barnum is far from a saint, yet he displays a certain degree of Christlikeness in the way he gathers in the lost, creating a community among those who have little in common but their brokenness. His show is a triumphal display of grace, a picture of the genuine diversity of those who find their homes in the Kingdom of Heaven. Barnum moved not only himself from the streets to the courts of kings but his curiosities, too. More importantly, he brought them together, to a place that, though outside the conventional parameters of home, was full of all the warm affection, belonging, and hospitality one associates with the very definition of such spaces.
Barnum’s show is a commercial success, and among the laudable elements of the film is the positive way it portrays entrepreneurship and market-oriented thinking. When recruiting acts for the show, Barnum sees beyond the superficial characteristics of his performers that make them unacceptable to the aforementioned “polite” society. He sees their unique talents and encourages them to hone them, to offer them as gifts (albeit ones with an admission price) to a world that hitherto had rejected them.
To help ensure that the gifts are well received (and that his show is more than merely a flash in the pan), Barnum hires Phillip Carlyle, a society swell and sometime playwright played with crisp self-assurance by Zac Efron. Carlyle has it all—wealth, literary fame, entrance into the most elite circles. Indeed, as he tells Barnum, “I quite enjoy the life you say I’m trapped in.” Yet he, no less than any other member of Barnum’s troupe, is constrained by what passes for respectability, consigned to a life of attending stuffy formal dinners, writing predictably inoffensive plays, and drinking whiskey to dull the dream of something more.
So trade that typical for something colorful
And if it’s crazy, live a little crazy
You can play it sensible, a king of conventional
Or you can risk it all and see’Cause you can do like you do
Or you can do like me
Stay in the cage, or you finally take the key
Oh, damn! Suddenly you’re free to fly
It’ll take you to the other side
It is true that many of us trade color for comfort in our lives, afraid to risk the thrilling freedom of flight for fear of the inevitable fall. But when he takes up Barnum’s offer to join in the administration of the circus, Carlyle demonstrates that one can sometimes have both. Casting his lot with the outcasts, he uses his connections and acumen to solidify the circus’s status in the community. He, perhaps even more than Barnum, comes to realize that the business venture they’ve embarked upon is not just about entertainment for the masses but also a project of restoration, of widening the perspective of society to take in those who were always there but simply invisible.
The redemptive nature of commerce is unmistakable here: The prospect of having a job doing what only they can do gives purpose to the members of the circus cast. They “come alive” as they realize they were made for more than merely an existence on the margins of society, and their hard work pays off in the eventual popularity of the show.
Having provided both a home and a living for the members of the troupe, however, Barnum stumbles a bit. Despite his proud talk about living “on the other side” of conventionality, the film has him grow tired of life on the margins of acceptability. He seeks a more respectable kind of fame and invests heavily in managing singer Jenny Lind’s tour of America, certain that this will give him the legitimacy he craves. Though this choice takes him far away from his family and circus, hurting those he loves, Barnum yields to the temptation. Yet, when his convictions are put to the ultimate test, Barnum returns home. He realizes, as do we, that ultimately the greatness of the Showman lay not in his ability to dazzle a voyeuristic world but rather in his ability to see and share in the glories of a Show not of his own creation.
Barnum built the circus in no small part to pay his bills and provide for his family, but along the way he did so much more—he used his prodigious talents to carve out a home for the outcast, to build a community that models far better than the stuffy, rule-bound Victorian era that what matters most in this life is not the work we do, per se, but rather our purpose in doing it.
For years and years
I chased their cheers
The crazy speed of always needing more
But when I stop
And see you here
I remember who all this was for
And from now on
These eyes will not be blinded by the lights
From now on
What’s waited till tomorrow starts tonight
It starts tonight
And let this promise in me start
Like an anthem in my heart
From now on
…And we will come back home
And we will come back home
Home, again!
The final scene of the film, when Barnum leaves the three-ring circus behind to attend his daughters’ ballet recital, is beautifully scored and choreographed. He arrives at the theater riding on an elephant, settles into the audience next to his long-suffering wife as the melody transitions from the driving orchestral arrangement to a single, lilting piano. We watch as he whispers, “It’s everything you ever want, it’s everything you ever need, and it’s here right in front of you …” He chokes up and can’t continue with the line—but he doesn’t have to, for we all know, “This is where you want to be.”
If interested, the musical adaptation of The Greatest Showman debuts in Spring 2026—in the U.K.
