Hugh Jackman
Radio City Music Hall
Various Dates Through October
At one point during Hugh Jackman’s concert at Radio City — it’s a one-man show with a cast of thousands — the actor asks if anyone in the audience knows him only as one of his characters, Wolverine. Admittedly, it’s a loaded question; nobody else from the universe of superhero movies and science fiction franchises is going to do anything comparable to his show, though Patrick Stewart of “Star Trek” once did a gag commercial about a make-believe album of “Cowboy Classics.”
It brought up a question: Which Hugh Jackman were we going to see this evening? The one I was hoping for was the Jackman who is one of the great leading men of the traditional Broadway musical. We did see at least a little of this incarnation, when he opened the Radio City show by levitation up on the big hydraulic stage and making his entrance singing a few lines of a rocked up version of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” the opening number from “Oklahoma!,” which he played on London’s West End in 1998.
A few minutes, later he launched into a spirited, full-on reading of “Trouble” from “The Music Man,” which he played on Broadway in 2022 — and which he introduced by informing us that he had played “Salesman #2” in a school production almost 50 years ago.
He made several references to Wolverine, which he illuminated with a complaint that there was a dance sequence in the character’s most recent appearance, last summer’s blockbuster “Deadpool and Wolverine,” in which he was not invited to participate. Thus, he evened up the score by recreating that choreography with his full complement of four dancers.
At 56, Mr. Jackman may be the most extreme example of a triple threat — actor/singer/dancer — that we have today; his most recent appearance on the New York stage was in the non-musical off-Broadway ‘Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes’ (reviewed in these pages) and his forthcoming film project, “Song Sung Blue,” is a drama that revolves around the songs of Neil Diamond.
We also got a glimpse of the more contemporary Broadway baritone in “Stars,” from his starring role in the 2012 film of “Les Misérables,” and in “You Will Be Found” from “Dear Evan Hanson.” The latter is a show that Mr. Jackman has ostensibly no connection to — or does he? That score is by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also wrote the songs for Mr. Jackman’s single most iconic vehicle, “The Greatest Showman.”
At Radio City, he sings more far numbers from that 2017 hit than any other score — a move that the crowd agrees with, judging from their overwhelming response, as when he gave us “The Other Side” as a duet with Adam Halpern, more usually the one male in Mr. Jackman’s quartet of back-up vocalists.
“Showman” has become the tentpole in the Jackman phenomenon — much as “Yentl” has done for Barbra Streisand; both were original film scores and essentially one-man shows with supporting casts, though,“Showman,” unlike “Yentl,” includes at least several numbers sung by characters other than the headlining star. It now seems Messrs. Pasek and Paul have essentially become Mr. Jackman’s go-to songwriters, who help him define his “brand,” like John Kander and especially Fred Ebb were for Liza Minnelli, or Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen were for Sinatra.
Mr. Jackman is the most interactive of concert performers; in fact during almost the whole show, the entire space in between songs, and often during the songs themselves, is given over to back-and-forth exchanges with the audience — and if not them, the dancers, Mr. Halpern and the back-up singers, or the members of the orchestra. He’s continually grabbing people’s cellphones, taking selfies or videos and handing them back. He also delivered Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” as an exercise in audience participation.
Thus was answered the question about which aspect of his multi-faceted persona he was going to present at Radio City. I must admit that the most appealing part of the evening was a medley of songs by his Australian countryman, Peter Allen, representing Mr. Jackman’s huge success in the 2003 “Boy From Oz.” Mr. Jackman isn’t a great “pure vocalist,” as Jimmy Webb would say. We wouldn’t want to hear him do a Sinatra songbook show, but he is among the most overwhelmingly entertaining personalities of our age — and the greatest showman to boot.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
