'This is Me' - of course it is.

 

Yesterday, the children at the performance club of the school I work at performed a three show run of an adaptation of The Greatest Showman. I’m the second adult in the club at so the de-facto assistant director (though the work has mainly been the other adult, she’s worked hard).

I signed up to help the club because I had to help one and I like performing. It was revealed what the performance was going to be after. At this point, I’d not actually seen The Greatest Showman, so my first job was to watch it. To be honest, I think it looks incredibly cheap. There are some awful cg enhanced shots and it simply didn’t convey the fun of the fair. I also found the re-telling of PT Barnum’s life to be absolutely baffling. Barnum is an interesting person, not a good person, but an interesting one. I’ve read a little about him and some of his performers and there’s a lot to unpack in Barnum and his relationships. I can see why a feel-good musical wouldn’t want to go into some of the grislier aspects of the story but I found it absolutely baffling that the character flaw given to Barnum (a flirted infidelity with Jenny Lind) was one of the few the real Barnum didn’t have. Why didn’t they just make it generic circus guy?

I’m partial to a musical. I’ve seen many of them on stage, I’ve even nicknamed my house Calamity Jane, but I never wanted to see this one.

The reason for that is the break-out song ‘This is Me’. I don’t like songs with ‘ohs’ in them very much and I found the subject generically dull. ‘This is Me’, of course it is. Are we not in an age of dull, anodyne, brand-savvy individualism? What else could a person write a song about these days?  

One of the people I’ve watched musical most with is my sister. We also try and watch Eurovision together and, if we can’t, we message each other throughout. This year, it was noticeable how many of the songs were cookie-cutter anthems of triumph about being yourself. It got boring. I really liked Nemo’s ‘The Code’ when it won last year, but seeing their new song this year, it was clear that Nemo only has one subject for songs… that being Nemo.

The other month I read a book called ’15 Lessons in New Thought’ by Elizabeth Towne. It was written in 1923 and contained life lessons from the perspective on New Thought, a mind-over-matter spiritualist movement that birthed Christian Science and influenced ideas of manifestation like ‘The Secret’. While it was the pseudo-scientific/pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo I was expecting (with a spicy hint of eugenics thrown in), I was surprised by the collective vision in it. The notion was that God is created from all the thoughts of all creation and his plan was not pre-determined but worked out by his creation, acting as nodes in his brain. If anything felt truly revolutionary in the book, it wasn’t the “your mind creates reality” bullshit, it was the notion of, “this is us”. 

“This is us” even makes better thematic sense in the musical than “this is me”, because the characters grow and become happier in themselves through the shared endeavour of putting on a show - the old Muppets formula. 

I couldn’t go into helping a production of The Greatest Showman with such a negative perspective though, I needed to find things I liked. The first thing I did was divorce the story from any true events, this was just the story of happy, handsome circus man and not any real person. I also had to acknowledge how much I enjoyed the choreography, especially in the song ‘The Other Side’ which is almost an OK Go video.

As time went on, I also started to enjoy the songs. ‘A Million Dreams’ is no ‘Rainbow Connection’ but it’s a sweet song, especially when sung by a group of forty children. The song I really started to like was ‘From Now On’. It follows a similar pattern to many songs in the show, someone starts off low, but through the power of the song ends triumphant. In this song, happy, handsome circus man has lost everything and feels like a chump for neglecting his friends and family. It begins full of the letter ‘I”. He sings about how he shall no longer be dazzled by fame and fortune. By the end of the song, all the ‘I’ has been replaced by ‘we’ and the chorus all sing how ‘we will come back home’. It was lovely to hear the ‘we’.