Another look at The Greatest Showman

With only a few more weeks to go before we hit 2019, I can already say that 2018 was the year of the movie musical. And certainly one of its biggest successes was The Greatest Showman. Not just at the box-office but also in record sales.

As of this writing, the soundtrack of The Greatest Showman is one of the biggest-selling albums of the year. It has now been streamed over three billion times. Can you just imagine that number? It has been certified 2X platinum by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and is one of only three albums that sold that much this entire year. The others are Beerbongs & Bentleys by Post Malone and Invasion Of Privacy by Cardi B.

This is no mean feat because The Greatest Showman is an original film musical. It was inspired by the life and certainly by the grand imagination of the legendary P.T. Barnum, a poor man who rose from nothing to create spectables. He is now regarded as a visionary who is believed to be the creator of show business as we know it today. It starred Hugh Jackman in the role of Barnum along with Michelle Williams, Zac Efron and Zendaya.

This means that it was not adapted from another source like a Broadway show or an old film. All of the songs were written for and were heard for the first time in the movie. Everybody who watched or heard the songs for the first time that very moment but found them so inspiring and so uplifting, they were singing the tunes right after they stepped out of the theater. And don’t tell me you were not.

And they continued to do so on the way home until before they went to bed. I have a strong feeling that the melodies kept playing inside their heads while they were asleep until the singing resumed the next day. The last time that something like that happened with a movie song was with Let It Go from the animated feature Frozen four years ago. And take note, that was just for one song. The Greatest Showman fans were singing almost everything.

With numbers like that I am not surprised that the producers thought of doing something to please the fans. And what a gem they came up with. This is The Greatest Showman – Reimagined a companion piece to the blockbuster 20th Century Fox picture. This is an all-star album featuring new versions of songs originally found on the chart-topping soundtrack. That means fresh takes on the compositions by the Grammy, Tony and Academy Award winning duo from La La Land of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul by some of today’s biggest pop stars. The line-up is truly a blast.

Every cut in Reimagined is a winner but I am partial to Pink’s A Million Dreams and Kelly Clarkson’s Never Enough. These two ladies so turned the songs around, they now sound as though they were originally written for them. These two songs are already more than worth the cost of the whole album. Come to think of it, Sarah Bareilles also did a great job with Tightrope, Michelle Williams solo ballad in the movie. And not to forget Zendaya’s acoustic Rewrite The Stars which is so sweet and who would have thought that Panic! At The Disco can make The Greatest Show rock like this or that Pentatonix can take this same song to another level.

Also included in The Greatest Showman – Reimagined are the Golden Globe winner and 3X Platinum-selling This Is Me presented in (The Reimagined Remix) by Keala Settle, Kesha and Missy Elliot; A Million Dreams by Pink’s talented daughter Willow Sage Hart; Come Alive by Years & Years and Jess Glynne; The Other Side by MAX and Ty Dolla Sign; Rewrite The Stars by James Arthur and Anne-Marie; From Now On by the Zac Brown Band; and the bonus tracks, Come Alive by Craig David and This Is Me by Kesha.

For more Greatest Showman sounds, fans who also love to sing, just like my neighbor and several of my friends do, there is The Greatest Showman: Sing-A-Long Edition. The album comes with a 32-page booklet containing all the song lyrics from the film. This means all of us can now birit This Is Me and A Million Dreams to our hearts’ content with the original accompaniment.

Now, now, do you think the producers will do the same thing to the soundtrack of A Star Is Born? It would be nice to make duets of Shallows a la Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.