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Barnum is directed by Jonathan O’Boyle and choreographed by Oti Mabuse.

Like a previous Barnum (Michael Crawford) Lee Mead has that wonderful ability to engage you wholesale in the emotional roller-coaster of his character with each utterly joyful and sometimes tearful note. His performance is electric and he is superbly supported by the whole talented ensemble and especially by his stage wife Chairy Barnum played by Monique Young, stalwart of many a West End show. Young brings out all the grounded love for her husband PT Barnum and her depiction of her beautifully sung songs feel genuinely heartfelt.

Actress and singer Penny Ashmore throws a romantic Swedish spanner into PT Barnum’s world with her seductive talents as ‘Swedish Nightingale’ Jenny Lind singing Love Makes Such Fools of Us All. Ashmore also works in the ensemble. Her vocals are sublime.

Dominique Planter makes 160 year old Joice Heth one of funniest parts of the show with her mad rendition of ‘Thank God I’m Old’ and uses her quality singing talents as Blues Singer warmly enabling the musical tone perfectly in the more poignant parts of Barnum.

General Tom Thumb – only twenty-five inches tall – played by Fergus Rattigan flings himself into the optimistic song ‘Bigger Isn’t Better’ with great gusto and his scene with Jumbo the lumbering elephant has the audience in stitches.

This is a very slick production with each of the all singing, all dancing, circus skilled cast putting in 200%. The live music (Musical Director Kevin Oliver Jones) is spot on acoustically and instrumentally and each musical number gets huge applause from the very appreciative Nottingham Playhouse audience.

Bang from the outset we are bedazzled by the cast playing circus artistes and bamboozled with Lee Mead’s baloney and all sorts of circus trickery and hokum pokum. The wonderful stage set is lit like a versatile Victorian gas lit theatre with all the colours of the spectrum thrown in for free. Well maybe not for free. A few worthwhile dollars may need to spent on a ticket or two, but like Barnum’s American Museum, I can envisage people heading for the egress and queuing round the block to see it again and again.

This exuberant production of Barnum is utterly breath-taking acrobatically, musically, visually and fizzing with theatrical energy and Eamonn Cox’s Ringmaster is fantastically good.

The whole concept of Barnum is that the audience get swept along wholesale on a huge musical and spectacular wave of unashamed enthusiasm and emotion and this Bill Kenwright show, that began its tour at Theatre Royal Windsor in Feb 2026, far from disappoints. In fact it excels beyond measure. The multi talented ensemble are a force of energy that could light up the whole of Nottingham one golden brick at a time.