When the reviews for The Greatest Showman started coming in, it seemed certain here was a film to be consigned to history. “Empty, moronic, pandering and utterly forgettable,” reckoned the Toronto Globe and Mail; the New York Post suggested the songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul were tacked on “like some drunk’s game of pin the tail on the donkey”. And The Greatest Showman was indeed consigned to history, but not in the way anyone expected: the film became a breakout hit and the soundtrack is currently No 1 in the UK album charts and No 2 in the US, having previously been No 1. Clearly, those songs are touching a nerve with a great many people.
But why should that surprise? A decade ago, the High School Musical saga proved there was still a huge and willing young audience for giddy self-empowerment anthems sung by personable-looking people, and Hamilton shows the voracious appetite for old stories told using modern music. At heart, The Greatest Showman’s soundtrack is the midway point between the two: a whole lot of self-empowerment, enlivened with some deracinated R&B beats, and given the necessary gravitas by some power ballads of the sort that make one imagine the singer filmed from below with a wind machine blowing in their face. From Now On, sung by Hugh Jackman, even manages to sound like Mumford & Sons reimagined for The X Factor.
Quite why The Greatest Showman soundtrack has found such a huge audience is a mystery to me: it’s not as if every single style on The Greatest Showman can’t be found done better elsewhere. Perhaps some of it is about context: in age of #MeToo and #blacklivesmatter, there’s something comforting about the feeling of “being on the right side” that This Is Me encourages – albeit that offering emotional and political support to the bearded lady community isn’t something liable to impinge on most listeners’ everyday lives.
The true appeal of the music, however, probably lies in Pasek and Paul’s way with a chorus. Subtlety be damned – these are refrains configured to flatten everything within a 50-mile radius; you can almost feel the shock waves from the massed voices. It’s music designed to take you from ennui to euphoria in the fastest possible time, with the least possible complication. And there will always be a market for that.
