Impossible comes true: How The Greatest Showman is dreaming up ‘wow factor’ circus stunts for the London stage

“This is the moment you've waited for…”

So says Hugh Jackman’s ringleader hero in the 2017 musical movie, The Greatest Showman – soon rolling up as a West End show.

Thanks in part to its banger-stuffed, chart-topping soundtrack, the film achieved global adoration following an initially lukewarm reception.

BRITAIN’S GOT CIRCUS TALENT

Dr Victoria Lowe, academic and author of Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen, expects the show to succeed because "theatricality is embedded in the DNA of the movie already.”

“Emphasising spectacle will ease the transition from film,” she explains.

Dr Victoria looks forward to getting up close and personal with the “danger”, a sense you are divorced from in the film but are more exposed to at a live performance.

To recreate the thrill of The Greatest Showman’s trademark stunts and acrobatics on stage, Disney is turning to Londoner Nathan Price.

Brought aboard by the show’s American circus director, Broadway and circus legend Lorenzo Pisoni, Nathan’s role is to “envision, devise, and facilitate the use of circus” in the adaptation.

Nathan knows a thing or two about circus, having been “obsessed” with the art form since he was 15 and learned to do a flip like the parkour runners he’d admired on television.

East London youth circus classes led him to the National Centre for Circus Arts where he trained in “hand to hand” acrobatics and landed a first class degree.

“I was hyper-fixated on circus and obsessed with the tiny details,” says Nathan.

“I think circus is one of those things where there has to be something wrong with you in some capacity ‘cause it hurts and you’re putting yourself in danger, or in my case you’re putting someone else in danger.”

Nathan’s jaw-dropping signature act involves supporting and propelling a “flyer”, his trapeze partner Isis Clegg-Venell, from the ground below.

The pair toured North America as part of Cirque du Soleil’s ice skating and acrobatics show, Crystal, and even wound up on Britain’s Got Talent in 2022.

Two years later, Nathan answered the call to join The Greatest Showman creative team. Nathan’s task was to “find ways to utilise circus to augment the storytelling and create circus wow factor” for the audience.

WORLDS COLLIDE

The first workshops for the show began in winter 2024. For six weeks, the company rented out the top floor of the National Youth Theatre in Holloway.

“We were very much in their (musical theatre) world and operating within that rule set, which is sort of a different one to circus.” Nathan recalls.

He collaborated closely with Lorenzo Pisoni and coached non-circus peers to trust circus techniques.

Nathan explains: “To the outside eye, circus looks incredibly dangerous, and that’s kind of the point of it. It looks dangerous, but it’s actually not risky. And some of the things we do that look the most dangerous are actually the easiest things to do. And some of the things that look the least dangerous are the hardest things to do and require the most focus.”

Nathan says the respective ensembles, musical and circus, became integrated. The finished product should feel like the different types of performer are occupying the “same world”.

What they are trying to avoid, he says, is having circus performers running on stage to do one-off tricks in between singing and dancing sequences.

“We found ways to marry the circus and the choreography and blend the two together. A woman gets thrown, like, 20 feet in the air, and then they land immediately back into another piece of choreography. It’s seamless.”

After two months of rehearsals at the English National Ballet earlier this year, the company packed up and headed to the Bristol Hippodrome. The sold-out eight-week limited engagement, an out-of-town tryout, refined the show in front of a live audience.

“It was like a very expensive scratch (work-in-progress). It's nuts,” laughs Nathan.

AWESTRUCK EARLY REACTIONS

The scratch did not disappoint.

Mickey-Jo Boucher, prolific theatre reviewer and YouTuber, attended the opening night in Bristol and says he left feeling “awestruck”.

“It really did take my breath away in what they were able to deliver. The scale of the production and the impact of it, the wall of sound, the strength of the ensemble, the transitions and reveals.“Just in the opening number alone, in the first five to 10 minutes, it’s very striking.”

Mickey-Jo also praises the production’s stylised elements: “You're never gonna win by just trying to exactly replicate what we've already seen on screen.”

Nathan Price describes this novel approach as using the “visual language of circus” to stylistically convey the drama. He gives the example of a scene where Anne Wheeler (portrayed by Zendaya in the movie) escapes from a burning building.

In Bristol, the fire scene was accomplished by a circus performer holding and guiding the actor downwards so that it looked like she was jumping out and falling.

Dr Victoria applauds the show’s use of circus as a motif. She says it will help “translate” the action from the film and that theatregoers will eat it up.

Anne-Marie & James Arthur - Rewrite The Stars [from The Greatest Showman: Reimagined] - YouTube

Watch On

“It is such a great moment,” Nathan smiles. Another, he says, is the “inventive” way they reimagined the “Rewrite the Stars” song sequence which was technically “impossible” to replicate in real life.

Mickey-Jo says the song’s aerial work is “elegant” and “very well done” and predicts it could be expanded for 2027 given the additional space available in the Theatre Royal.

“I think Mary Poppins has set an expectation for actors to fly out over us,” he laughs.

FROM BRISTOL TO BROADWAY?

For Nathan, an early indicator of a job well done was the patterns of applause he observed in Bristol. At the circus, audiences typically clap “in the moment”, whereas musical theatre etiquette prefers applause at the end of songs.

The Greatest Showman, Nathan says, breaks down this cultural norm and elicits adhoc reactions.

“Our art form of circus slipped in,” he beams.

Mickey-Jo expects the transcendent applause and appreciation to cross the Atlantic in the near future.

He says: “Ultimately, I do think it is being built to go over to Broadway as well. At one point we'd heard that it was skipping London and it was going straight there, but now evidently that's not what's happening, but they're definitely thinking about both markets simultaneously.”

Ahead of the West End premiere, Nathan is performing in Sophie’s Surprise Christmas Party in Soho. He describes it as a circus-filled “cabaret show with a twist” and a “silly and exciting” alternative option to pantomimes this festive season.

Come the spring, The Greatest Showman will also need to differentiate itself from its neighbours. The family entertainment market is currently dominated by West End darlings like Matilda and Paddington.

“I think it has adult appeal as well as for those family audiences. It’ll be received pretty well critically and it ticks all of the boxes,” Mickey-Jo adds.

“It’s big and spectacular.”

The Greatest Showman opens in London in spring 2027 and tickets go on sale soon. Sophie’s Surprise Christmas Party at the Udderbelly Boulevard runs from November 13th until January 10th, tickets are available now from £30.

What to watch: new movies and TV shows to stream this week

Skip the search — follow Shortlist on Google News to get our best lists, news, features and reviews at the top of your feeds!

Sam McEvans is a freelance journalist and former communications manger. He's written for publications including Shortlist, The Guardian, The Daily Mirror, The Sun and Metro.