Come Alive is a tricky one to review because the question here is less ‘is this a good example of a mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’ and more ‘what the hell are the criteria for a good mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’
Conceived and directed by Simon Hammerstein, the brains behind posh strip club The Box, Come Alive occupies a huge building in Earl’s Court dubbed the Empress Museum, formerly called the Daikin Centre and home to an immersive David Attenborough documentary.
The actual big top-style performance space is comparatively intimate: 700 seats is not tiny, but if an obvious point of comparison is Cirque du Soleil’s annual shows at the Royal Albert Hall, then Come Alive offers similarly skilled acrobats at appreciably closer range – you can see each muscle contort and flex. The rest of the building has been given over to a sort of Greatest Showman-themed mini-mall: overpriced food, overpriced drinks, overpriced fancy dress clobber - but done in high travelling-circus style and there’s a little bit of gratis pre-show acrobatics in one corner of it that’s well worth catching.
Anyway. Circus. And the songs from The Greatest Showman. I think one basic point here is that presumably literally every person who has bought a ticket to Come Alive will love the Benj Pasek and Justin Paul tunes from the film already. They’re done well – performed live and with personality, but also very faithfully, ie no drastic sonic reinvention; This is Me still sounds exactly like This is Me.
Arguably the circus is mostly there as something to look at to accompany the songs, although rather than just random setpieces, Hammerstein’s show attempts to extrapolate a plot from the tunes. Which is a bit peculiar when you consider they’re already part of the plot of The Greatest Showman, but Come Alive is attempting to extrapolate a different plot from them. Admittedly a lot of the appeal of the film’s soundtrack is down to the fact the songs aren’t very specific, lyrically speaking. Nonetheless, it’s often bizarre to hear them rearranged into a wafer-thin, bordering-on-incoherent story that has nothing to do with PT Barnum, but rather something about a young woman named Max who visits the circus with her boyfriend, takes on the mantle of The Greatest Showman from the previous holder, and then possibly feels a bit guilty about the whole thing.
Okay, circus plots are almost invariably nonsensical. But there’s something extra jarring about Come Alive being so explicitly based upon a film with a story, but subbing in a much worse story.
And herein we get to the question of whether there’s much point in critiquing any of this - it’s the songs from The Greatest Showman performed live nicely. It’s some old-school but impressive acrobatics, quite close up. The venue is cool if you have a bit of money to spend. I think all these things are individually true and may be individually appealing. But as a coherent hybrid concept… it’s at best a fun placeholder until Disney’s in-the-works stage musical finally rumbles over the horizon. But if you love these songs and don’t want to wait – well why not?
