Come Alive! The Greatest Showman Circus Spectacular: certainly a lot of spectacle, sadly lacking in storyline
If you’ve seen and enjoyed the film The Greatest Showman, there’s a fairly good chance you’ll love Come Alive! – although it’s worth knowing exactly what you’re buying a ticket for. This is not a straight stage version of the Hugh Jackman movie, but a circus spectacular that takes some of the movie’s music, spirit and visual flamboyance and throws them into a big-top blender.
Following a successful, extended and sell-out London run, Come Alive! arrived in Australia with an all-Australian company, opening in Sydney before moving to Perth. The Sydney season received some seriously enthusiastic reviews, with one critic calling it a five-star night of pure joy, while others praised the extraordinary circus skills and high-energy performers.
Perth’s opening weekend also landed well, but then it does’t take much…
The cast of singers, dancers and dozen-and-a-half circus performers certainly have the talent to deliver the goods with aerial work, tumbling, hoops, fire-eating, and a particularly hair-raising high-wire sequence. But because we’ve been to so many Fringe shows, it seems we’ve seen most of these aerial antics before.
Des Flanagan, familiar from Moulin Rouge! and Cats, plays an engaging, cheeky Showman, while Ruby Clark’s Max provides the emotional centre. The pair are in good company with nary a hiccup throughout the hour-and-a-half performance.
The songs are mostly drawn from the movie – A Million Dreams, The Greatest Show, This Is Me, From Now On and Tightrope among them, all performed live, although they have been rearranged and recontextualised for a circus style.
The show is well choreographed, non-stop in its action, and boasts beautifully crafted props that connote ye olde circuses of a century ago. On an aesthetic front, it ticks all the right boxes.
A special shout out to the clown folks, who stay in flamboyant character throughout, entering and exiting on cue whenever the script gets a bit stale. The dialogue and story are apparently deliberately loose.
Rather than reproducing the movie’s screenplay, Come Alive! uses a new, relatively simple narrative involving Max, The Showman and a circus troupe as a thread connecting all the other acts. In other words, don’t come expecting Hugh Jackman’s Greatest Showman with different actors. The plot here: Dude is a ringleader in a circus; his girlfriend suddenly gets a epiphany that she should join the troupe; he doesn’t like the idea of this; cue a major couple’s drama.
Do come to the show, however, expecting colour, spectacle, some very good physical action, and a soundtrack you might already know off by heart.
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