Two faces of Hugh

Softer side

Given his charming performance as the Oscar host in 2009, it comes as no surprise that Hugh Jackman’s recent Broadway special was a box office success. Ben Brantley unveils the essence of the actor’s latest theatrical enterprise.

It takes two to be Hugh. The most adored performer on Broadway has to be, without question, Hugh Jackman – both of him. Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway, at the Broadhurst Theater, had created a 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 Jackman’s show was that he contained, if not multitudes, then a teeming crowd of two. Eight times a week he cleft himself in twain for the delectation of largely female audiences who love him just for his selves.

Let’s face it. 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. 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, 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 naive young women are told to watch out for when they’re searching for a mate. 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 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 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 Jackman embodying another, similar Rodgers and Hammerstein figure, singing the Soliloquy of Billy Bigelow, the burly carnival barker from Carousel.

In between, though, 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.

Second act

The show’s highlight is one in which Jackman, in second-skin gold lame, reincarnates the pansexual Australian songwriter and performer Peter Allen (who died of AIDS in 1992). Though 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 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 theatre-goers, 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.

Jackman’s erotic energy is purely and pleasurably consensual. For some women, his double-jointedness makes him the perfect platonic lover: part leading-man seducer, part gay best friend (who picks up your spirits by singing show tunes with you).

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. 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.