The Greatest Showman Musical is heading to London’s West End, with Theatre Royal Drury Lane set to host the production from spring 2027. Samantha Barks will return to the show and star alongside Oliver Tompsett, giving the stage version of the film musical its biggest London platform yet.
The news landed at the D23 Disney fan convention in Anaheim, California, where Disney confirmed the next step for the show after its sell-out world premiere run at The Bristol Hippodrome earlier in 2025. For Barks, the move marks a return after the earlier U.K. run, and it places the production squarely in the spotlight before the first performance date has even been fixed.
Tompsett will play P.T. Barnum, with Barks as Charity Barnum, Ben Joyce as Phillip Carlyle, Vajén van den Bosch as Jenny Lind and Malinda Parris as Lettie Lutz. Casey Nicholaw is directing and choreographing the production, which is being mounted by Disney Theatrical Group with The Seelig Group.
The stage show is adapted from the 2017 musical film starring Hugh Jackman, and it draws on the film songs while adding new material for the stage. Tim Federle wrote the book from Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon’s screenplay and a story by Bicks, while Benj Pasek and Justin Paul wrote the score. Paul is handling vocal and incidental music arrangements, and Alex Lacamoire is overseeing music supervision, incidental and dance music arrangements, and orchestrations.
That leaves the biggest unanswered piece for the London run still hanging: exact dates. The production is being presented as a major West End event, but the only timing now on the table is spring 2027. For a show that has already sold out once in the U.K., the announcement is enough to start the clock, but not enough yet to tell audiences exactly when the curtain will rise.
The announcement also places The Greatest Showman Musical into a longer Barnum lineage. The stage version is the second about P.T. Barnum’s life, following Barnum, which premiered on Broadway in 1980. The new production will now try to turn the film’s scale, its emotional sweep and its built-in songs into a West End opening that matches the attention it has already drawn before a single London date has been pinned down.
