It may seem odd now, but in the golden age of Hollywood musical biopics were pretty common. Movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy used the thin veneer of fact used to justify a lot of great singing and dancing while recounting the lives of famous people, sort of. That’s never entirely gone away; any biopic of a musician is essentially a musical where people breaking out in song makes logical sense. Barnum, comes in. Nobody’s going to talk about Joice Heth in this movie, or that Barnum made a fortune from running the lottery, or his long, storied, and sometimes bizarre political career.
