http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/theater/how-hugh-jackmans-two-sides-make-women-swoon.html?_r=1&ref=arts&src=me&pagewanted=all
Arts & Leisure
Hugh Jackman Keeps His Pants On
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: December 8, 2011 
Hugh Jackman with fans after the opening night of his Broadway show. 
Hugh Jackman signing shirts for Broadway's AIDS charity.
Hugh Jackman, rugged show-tune lover.IT takes two to be Hugh. The most adored performer on Broadway at the moment is, without question,
Hugh Jackman, both of him.
“Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway,” at the
Broadhurst Theater, has created this season’s most virulent case of box office fever by presenting the snazziest single double act New York has known since
Alice Ripley and
Emily Skinner played Siamese twins in
“Side Show” 14 years ago.
Technically, you may object, there’s only one Hugh Jackman. He’s that strapping, muscle-flexing actor who plays the manly mutant
Wolverine in the lucrative
“X-Men” movie franchise. But wait a minute. Isn’t he the swivel-hipped song-and-dance man who won a Tony Award in 2004 playing the epicene entertainer
Peter Allen in
“The Boy From Oz”?
The point of Mr. Jackman’s show — which ends its limited, sold-out run on Jan. 1 and is the hardest ticket in New York to come by — is that he contains, if not multitudes, then a teeming crowd of two. Eight times a week he clefts himself in twain for the delectation of largely female audiences who love him just for his selves. Let’s face it. Mr. Jackman is, unapologetically and triumphantly, the bi-est guy in town: bicultural, bimorphic, binational, biprofessional and, for entertainment purposes, bisexual.
I’m really not talking about sexual identity here. Well, I am, but only in a Platonic sense. Mr. Jackman makes a point of reminding us throughout his fleet-footed show, which combines musical numbers with an “All About Hugh” narrative, that he’s a long- and happily married man, and I have no evidence to the contrary. But despite — or perhaps because of — his firmly affirmed marital status Mr. Jackman often gleefully comports himself onstage in the manner of what, in less enlightened times, might have been called a flaming queen.
First of all, the guy makes no bones about saying that he loves musicals. And male musical-comedy love is one of those red flags that naïve young women are told to watch out for when they’re searching for a mate.
Mr. Jackman, though, would like to make it clear that a fellow can wallow in a splashy, dance-crammed
Vincente Minnelli film like
“The Band Wagon” and still be a sweaty ace on the playing field. (That’s one of the lessons of the television series
“Glee” too, but Mr. Jackman claimed the territory first.) Growing up in
Sydney, Australia, he tells his audience, he couldn’t wait for Sunday afternoons, when the local television station would show old movie musicals. But please note that the young Hugh would sit down to bliss out on
Busby Berkeley only after rugby practice on Sunday mornings.
This dichotomy shapes both the form and content of “Back on Broadway,” which is directed and choreographed by
Warren Carlyle, lending it a wholesome, all-embracing eroticism that would seem to be more appealing to women than to men. (That’s certainly been confirmed by the demographics of audiences I’ve seen there.) The show unfolds as a point-counterpoint presentation of, if you will, the yin and yang of Hugh.
His opening number,
Rodgers and Hammerstein ’s
“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” is from
“Oklahoma!,” the most classic of classic musicals, in which Mr. Jackman starred for the
National Theater in London in 1998. He played Curly the cowman, a reminder of when musical-comedy heroes were virile guys’ guys and shy showoffs with women. The first of act of “Back on Broadway” ends with Mr. Jackman embodying another, similar Rodgers and Hammerstein figure, singing the
“Soliloquy” of
Billy Bigelow, the burly carnival barker from
“Carousel.” In between, though, Mr. Jackman slips out of the clenched-fist, working-clothes persona of the Rodgers and Hammerstein man and into something more shimmery. He confesses — and succumbs — to urges to swing his hips and tap his toes. A medley centered on the song
“I Won’t Dance” becomes an anatomical, Jekyll-and-Hyde study of a man being seduced by Broadway rhythms, erupting into show-boy choreography despite himself.
Mr. Jackman explains that this sort of dancing gives him a lithe, lean body that is markedly different from that of the bulked-up Wolverine he plays in the “X-Men” films, and he shows us movie footage to illustrate the difference. The producers of “X-Men,” Mr. Jackman says, worry about this transformation from mesomorph to ectomorph. But watching “Back on Broadway,” you feel that if he chose, he could regrow those missing muscles on the spot. He doesn’t of course. Instead, his body becomes even more serpentine for the top of the second act, and the show’s high point.
This is the sequence in which Mr. Jackman, in second-skin gold lamé, reincarnates the pansexual Australian songwriter and performer Peter Allen (who died of AIDS in 1992). Though Mr. Jackman has been flirting with the audience since the show began, as Allen he progresses into serious polymorphous foreplay. Conducting an erotic dialogue with a drum beat (and the drummer who provides it), he’s about as far from Curly as Oklahoma is from Australia.
Australia itself is the focal point for other illustrations of Mr. Jackman’s double-sided nature. While he serenades Manhattan with a smitten rendition of
Cole Porter’s
“I Happen to Like New York,” he lets us know that even as a Gothamite, he remains an easygoing, outdoors-loving Aussie. And when he sings
“Over the Rainbow,” he performs it with four indigenous Australian musicians and a new mystical-sounding arrangement.
Singing “Over the Rainbow” on a Broadway stage is throwing down a gauntlet. That’s the song most associated with
Judy Garland, whose concerts at
Carnegie Hall half a century ago are remembered as the ultimate transcendent love affairs between a singer and an audience. Because of his intimate rapport with theatergoers, Mr. Jackman has been compared to Garland. And there’s a classically Garlandesque moment in “Back on Broadway” when he reaches from the stage to clasp the hands of audience members reaching up to him.
But, oh, what a gap separates Le Jackman and La Garland. She too embodied the performer as a divided self, but in a far more frightening (and, yes, exciting) way. She was perhaps the ultimate example of the star who loved and hated the anonymous souls who loved her, who needed them and resented them in equal measures. Accounts of Garland in concert often speak of the suspense of them, of never knowing if she might suddenly turn on her audience or herself.
That same nervous anticipation emanates from the one-woman shows of Garland’s daughter
Liza Minnelli, who, for the record, was briefly married to Peter Allen. Will she make it all the way to the final curtain? The answer to that question seems to hinge on the amount of the adoration her audience is willing to give her. Even an utterly in-control, spectacle-camouflaged pop artist like
Lady Gaga exudes a raw hunger — for the embrace of the little monsters in the dark — that provides a titillating edge of discomfort. And a swaggering macho hip-hop artist like
Kanye West has been known to melt down onstage into orgies of self-abusing revelation.
From the era of
Billie Holiday to that of
Amy Winehouse, singers with cult followings have often seemed poised over a black of hole of pain that might swallow them at any moment. When Garland did
“Get Happy,” it was perceived as a triumph of style over sorrow. The relationship between this kind of performer and the audience is always tinged with sadomasochism. Mr. Jackman generates no such frissons. His erotic energy is purely and pleasurably consensual. For some women his double-jointedness makes him the perfect platonic lover: part leading-man seducer (who gives you the best sex you never had), part gay best friend (who picks up your spirits by singing show tunes with you).
And for all his charm and charisma, as a singer of standards, he isn’t nearly on Garland’s level as an interpretive artist. I think that’s partly because — matters of vocal talent aside — there’s no discernible friction between the different Hughs, no danger of internal combustion. His emotional arithmetic is clear-cut, elementary-school-level division.
I recently went back to a Wednesday matinee, after which he auctioned off items of apparel he had worn that day for the charity
Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. He raised at least $28,000 that afternoon, and it’s worth itemizing the tab: two sweat-soaked undershirts (at $10,000 apiece) and a gold belt he wore as Peter Allen ($8,000).
So there were mementoes from both Hughs. But I never felt he was selling off pieces of his heart, which I assume is equally divided. (Whose isn’t?) That organ he keeps to himself, and I suspect that he’ll live the longer for doing so.
