Barnum – The Circus Musical

The Storyboard Entertainment production of Barnum is a tedious and painful slog which no amount of spectacular gymnastics and colourful set pieces can save. Purportedly a ’reimagining’ of Mark Bramble and Michael Stewart’s musical, it’s difficult to tell where the imagination comes into it: largely, the ‘circus’ performances are admirable and intriguing enough to begin with, but fail to leaven a patchy, repetitive storyline and an unremarkable set of songs. Telling the life story of PT Barnum, a famed showman, it intersperses his climb to fame with his marital troubles and the series of acrobatics, gymnastics, and other performances which are doled out to the audience unceremoniously. Unfortunately, these start to feel like a shallow distraction from the lack of substance in the musical far before the overlong clowning segment that opens the second act.

Todd McKenney’s performance as Barnum remained strained and unconvincing across the two-hour run. The only moments where the charm the script alludes to shows through are the ones not in the script, like when McKenney breaks the fourth wall to make a jab about contemporary politics or to ask for Hugh Jackman (who played the same character in The Greatest Showman) before completing a tightrope walk. Rachael Beck, as Charity Barnum, almost brings something real to her lyrics through her impressive vocals, but is ultimately constrained by the one-note, harrumphing wife figure called for in the script. Only Kirby Burgess, who plays the Ringmaster and a series of historical figures, manages to transcend the poorness of the musical, with an unforgettable voice and a knack for slipping seamlessly into a slew of different characters. Her flashes of brilliance, like all of the parts of the musical which aren’t a bore to sit through, are momentary, fleeting, and mired by a charmless production.

Most striking of the production’s sins are its historical ones: the music expects us to take delight in the exhibition of Joice Heth, a Black American slave who was mostly paralysed before Barnum began to exhibit her as the world’s oldest woman, then allowing her body to be publicly autopsied. This is turned into an upbeat song about the pleasure of being old. Tom Thumb, a little person whose stature Barnum exploited in search of profits, is given similar treatment. Nods to the exploitation innate in Barnum’s show come across here and there in the script, but it still doesn’t have a problem naming, in a patter song about the collection of Barnum’s museum, a “tribe of Aborigines”. The obvious question is how a fun blockbuster musical could be expected to reckon with these historical cruelties. A better, more relevant one is to ask why PT Barnum’s cultural legacy is allowed to be rehabilitated through the production of this musical at all.