Hugh Jackman and the Art of Acting

[ruby]

Mar 10, 2019 21:06:14 GMT -5 jo said:

There were some sad scenes in TBFO, but I must have missed scenes where tears were coursing down his cheek. Although I wasn't sure in that scene where he came back to Australia and as he talked to his Mum. Sorry.

The only one where I actually saw his eyes welling up and a solitary tear course down his check was that scene close to the final scene ( before his character committed suicide). I was lucky to be seated in front ( or second row) for a few performances, which was why I could see it happening in every performance -- I could not quite believe that he could summon the tears in each and every performance. What an actor!


Jo

Peter always quietly let tears go while Greg sang the end of I Honestly Love You to him and he reached out to the illusion of Greg still there. Usually wiped his cheek as he phased into the next scene.

[njr]

Mar 10, 2019 21:55:40 GMT -5 ruby said:

Mar 10, 2019 21:06:14 GMT -5 jo said:

There were some sad scenes in TBFO, but I must have missed scenes where tears were coursing down his cheek. Although I wasn't sure in that scene where he came back to Australia and as he talked to his Mum. Sorry.

The only one where I actually saw his eyes welling up and a solitary tear course down his check was that scene close to the final scene ( before his character committed suicide). I was lucky to be seated in front ( or second row) for a few performances, which was why I could see it happening in every performance -- I could not quite believe that he could summon the tears in each and every performance. What an actor!


Jo

Peter always quietly let tears go while Greg sang the end of I Honestly Love You to him and he reached out to the illusion of Greg still there. Usually wiped his cheek as he phased into the next scene.

Yes! That was what I was thinking of! 😢

[jo]

Maybe this can also be posted on this thread which recognizes Hugh Jackman's acting talent!


Not the appropriate thread, but close enough because like James Cagney, he is the greatest showman/performer!

[jo]

Chris Edmund, the acting teacher most often mentioned by Hugh Jackman as most influential in his early training, is interviewed on Irish Radio by Ryan Tubrid.

www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/rteradiowebpage.html#!rii=b9%5F21531914%5F20433%5F29%2D03%2D2019%5F

Hope the link is ok, as the interview focuses on his impressions of Hugh in the first part of the 18-minute interview. If you get the link to the total hour-long interview, I think the portion where Chris talks about Hugh is around the 20 minute mark ( or thereabouts) of the 53 minute show.


Edit : It is a circuitous way to find it --

Click on the link
Get Flash Player
Look for RTE 1
Look for Ryan Tubrid show of March 29, 2019.


May I summarize some of the things mentioned by Mr. Edmund :



*He found Hugh to be a very charismatic young man when they first worked together at WAAPA. He found him to be very focused and knew exactly what he wanted from the WAAPA program.

Btw, Chris is actually British who found himself being appointed at WAAPA to teach. He was also a director when he was invited to WAAPA. He eventually married there and stayed in Australia.

He said Hugh was also very mature and always curious about persons and about things. He was never self-absorbed or only thought of himself.


*One of the first things they ask new WAAPA students ( which at one time had 900 applications for 18 student places) was to be involved in a Shakespeare play ( in an aspect of studies called Discovery Places), partly to see how they handle extremely difficult assignments. He directed a Shakespeare play and asked Hugh to play KING LEAR and Chris was very impressed with Hugh!

*He said that Hugh has the persona and talent to carry a film! He talked of seeing Broadway to Oz and he was so impressed to see how Hugh carried each audience member in the palm of his hand. Ryan mentioned how he was so impressed with how Hugh personified Barnum in The Greatest Showman.

*In the middle of the interview when Ryan asked him about having a "writer's block", he said that the person who helped him out was actually Hugh. This must have been later in life. Hugh told him that he knew someone with a writer's block who turned to another art form. Chris followed Hugh's suggestion and started painting. To-date, he says he has had 4 art exhibitions!


Jo

[jo]

Remember this




The scholarship in Chris Edmund's name at WAAPA is partly funded by the Jackman/Furness Foundation.

@edmundscholars and #MasterCard hashtag

Sydney, 16 October 2015 – Director and teacher Chris Edmund announced the winner of the Chris Edmund Scholarship last night to third-year Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) acting student, Shalom Brune-Franklin. Presented at WAAPA, the AUD$17,000 prize was provided through a collaboration with MasterCard and the Jackman Furness Foundation for Performing Arts (JFFPA).

The MasterCard Scholarship was named in honour of Edmund; a director, teacher, writer and painter. Edmund was Head of Directing, then Head of the Acting Department at WAAPA for 30 years and trained the likes of Hugh Jackman, Frances O’Connor and Jai Courtney.

[njr]

Wasn’t sure if this was the right place to put this, but just got an email from IMDb.com with this included:

www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi3995647257

Nancy

[jo]

[jo]

I think Hugh mesmerizes film fans when the role and portrayal are heavily dramatic! That ties in with his very masculine persona. He can do rom-com and even light drama like The Front Runner and Australia, but it is in heavy portrayals of strong and heroic roles that he excels.


I would add his Valjean portrayal in LES MISERABLES to that list!

[jo]

This was from last year, when Hugh celebrated his 50th birthday.

It's a tribute column from FILM EXPERIENCE as well as a soundboard ( see Readers Responses) for the favorite Hugh movie --


thefilmexperience.net/blog/2018/10/12/hugh-jackman-at-50.html

[jo]

People are beginning to realize how talented and versatile Hugh Jackman is! On many performing mediums!

[jo]

And let me add CHARLIE KENTON ( Real Steel),JEAN VALJEAN, and PHINEAS T BARNUM to that list. Also, his character in SWORDFISH and HAPPY FEET.

[jo]

[jo]

I'm trying to appreciate the point of this article -- written before Hugh comes to Australia for a 26-date music tour in Australia!

It seems like the best example of Australia's Tall Poppy Syndrome

Huge Ackman: The Curious Case of Hugh Jackman’s Career
July 20, 2019 by Sam Twyford-Moore



In the 2001 romantic comedy Kate & Leopold, Hugh Jackman plays a duke living in the late 1800s who falls through an unexplained time portal. He awakens in the very early 21st century, relatively injury free, to find himself in the apartment above Kate McKay, a market researcher played by Meg Ryan. They strike up an unlikely romance and go through the usual fish-out-of-water motions such movies demand (my God, he doesn’t know how to use a toaster!). From there, the film is, literally, linearly regressive. The story actively punishes Kate for even daring to think about pursuing a career, sending her back to the 1870s at the film’s end so she can be with the beloved duke ― effectively rescinding every aspect of her civic life, including, most obviously, the right to vote.


Upon the release of Kate & Leopold, Jackman was largely given positive critical notices, distinctly separate from Ryan’s drubbings. He was singled out for acting convincingly enough as to sell the foundational concept of the film. Such praise for an actor only seems to arrive when the film in question is as weak in premise as Kate & Leopold; shouldn’t there be some kind of moral criticism of Jackman for acting straight faced in such obviously atavistic material, rather than being lauded for simply possessing the skills necessary to sell hokum? Maybe not. Maybe 2001 was actually a long time ago, now worthy of our forgiveness. Either way, Kate & Leopold would prove to be the last breath of Meg Ryan’s romantic comedy career ― she clearly, and very understandably, appeared to want out of the majority of the film’s runtime ― but it would also serve as an introduction to Hugh Jackman’s successful man-out-of-time routine, one that has extended to his own public image (bizarrely, Kate & Leopold would also signal the start of a successful partnership with director James Mangold, who would go on to collaborate closely with Jackman on the final two Wolverine films).


This tension between his public personality and his actorly persona shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given how much Jackman manages to wring out of his character in the early-career Kate & Leopold. Jackman is, seemingly, at his very best when you place him somewhere within the span of the 19th century. In both Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) and Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman (2017) he plays characters ― in the former a deranged magician, in the latter a huckster of a ringleader ― obsessed with the pursuit of spectacle and showmanship. Jackman has let those roles deliberately bleed into his own professional pursuits, spending most of his 2019 showing how much he has learnt from the salesmen he once played. Newly 50, he has been busy indeed unrolling an international set of stadium tours, all under the title Hugh Jackman ― The Man. The Music. The Show.



It might be telling that the clunky, declarative title doesn’t include The Actor in it, nor The Movies. Jackman seems to be positioning himself away from being considered as a great actor ― even though he sometimes really can be ― and is instead asking that you to read him as a cultural icon. Whatever its overall intentions, the enterprise ― and it is most certainly an enterprise ― signals the pomp and ceremony that Jackman is so good at serving up, at once serious and not.

The effort feels carried along by the fact of its very unlikeliness. Jackman has, in reality, only been on cinema screens for 20 years, and the notion of a stadium show feels like the kind of monumental, self-reflecting victory lap earned by someone who has spent much longer in our collective memories. The venture certainly risks his film legacy being reduced into wholesale product; he’s aware that there are, perhaps, people who only want to buy one thing from him: the malleable machismo of one James ‘Logan’ Howlett. From (practically unwatchable) leaked footage of the performances staged so far, Jackman appears accompanied by a montage of his past roles, as he operatically sings ‘The Greatest Show’, the almost titular track The Greatest Showman, and quips that if any audience members have come only knowing him from playing Wolverine, it might prove to be a long night for them.



As an actor, Jackman was almost completely unknown to mainstream audiences when he was introduced as Wolverine in the U.S. summer blockbuster season of 2000 in the unexpected hit X-Men (it was unlikely that he would have even registered that well with Australian viewers at the time). There’s an added layer of perversity to this: the rapid rise of his career in America was based almost solely on dumb luck. Scottish actor Dougray Scott was supposed to play the Wolverine role, but got caught up in delays on the Australian set of John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 (2000). Jackman was only given the chance to audition after being recommended by Russell Crowe, who, having turned down the role himself, had called director Bryan Singer to make the case for his fellow countryman. Jackman was at the time starring in a revival production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, and had to go through nine auditions to secure the role, including attending one interview in a baseball cap, tamping down the perm he was wearing in order to play Curly McLain on stage. His commitment was duly noted.


Rewatching that first X-Men movie now, he is far more soft-featured than you remember; an uncanny experience, if only because the defining characteristic of that superhero is being grizzled. Jackman has described his own uncertainty when starting out in the role, understandable given the haste of his casting, and the outlandish, intimidating size of the players around him, including British theatre greats Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. After X-Men cemented his Hollywood status, however, he joined their stature, and was speedily cast in a number of roles intended as big swings. The results weren’t great, given that they include the grotty and confused post-Matrix hacker film Swordfish (2001) [if you wanted to see a blonde-tipped Hugh Jackman get a forced blowjob while being held at gunpoint, then this is the viciously empty film for you!] and a further attempt at a wolf-adjacent franchise in the overcooked Dracula revamp Van Helsing (2004). It seems that at some point after those lukewarm efforts, Jackman settled on following through with Wolverine’s franchise success, allegedly turning down the lucrative role of James Bond to focus on one franchise.

The American film and cultural critic Karen Han is partly known for her tongue-in-cheek ‘Karen’s Boys’ ― a makeshift category of male actors who, while not conventionally handsome, she believes to be worthy of being a ‘crush’. Han has edited two montage videos set to Charli XCX’s 2017 pop hit Boys featuring those deemed worthy of admission to her curated collection ― chief among them are Ben Mendelsohn and Noah Taylor, an informal distinction that posits both Australian actors as slightly cult figures, as opposed to mainstream break-outs like Russell Crowe or Guy Pearce, or, indeed, Hugh Jackman.

Inspired by Han, and her love for Mendelsohn in particular (and a little thirsty myself maybe), I decided, as a lark, to edit together my own version ― using only Australian actors in films set in Australia, or in films made by Australian directors. It somehow never even occurred to me to include Jackman in it. This could partly come down to the fact that Jackman is simply too conventionally handsome to be included within Han’s broad, underdog-championing guidelines, but then someone like Pearce did make the cut ― although Pearce has actively resisted the kind of casting that goes along with his level of good looks, whereas Jackman has leant into his. I would suggest, however, that Jackman’s absence in my mind in this experiment largely came from the fact that he just isn’t in many Australian films, and his cultural presence isn’t associated directly with Australian cinema.



Indeed, Jackman only had two pre-Wolverine Australian film credits to his name when he came into his American stardom. Those two films – Erskineville Kings and Paperback Hero – were both released in 1999 and the films again represented his two primary modes: one is an over-earnest family drama set in the inner west of Sydney, the other a cheesy romance. Jackman’s performances in both films are, respectively, vaguely threatening and charmingly vague. Erskineville Kings watches like an extended vanity project for its lead actor – and the writer of the film ― Marty Denniss, who, like Jackman, had graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and who, unlike Jackman, never appeared in another film. Undeniably, the movie plays more like an extended showreel for Jackman than an actual film (despite the fact that he doesn’t show up until half an hour in). The rest of the actors, including a baby-faced Joel Edgerton, come off as amateur at best, and first time director Alan White includes long takes of characters moodily walking between locations as clumsy scene transitions, which makes it feel like an undergraduate effort. That the film somehow managed to capture one of the biggest stars in Hollywood in the brief seconds before they became so is some kind of miracle at work.
Paperback Hero, meanwhile, is just as throwaway ― or at least as single-use ― as its title suggests. That film briefly seemed to set Jackman up for a future of romantic lead roles, confirmed by Kate & Leopold and the completely forgotten Someone Like You (2001), but he hasn’t since made a return to the genre. Indeed, Jackman’s career has been one of repetitions and refusals. Jackman didn’t return to Australia to make a film until, well, Australia in 2008 (unless you count his voice work in Happy Feet (2006) as an Elvis-singing penguin, which you probably shouldn’t). He was evidently returning a favour by replacing Russell Crowe in Baz Lurhmann’s chaotic, ham-fisted attempt at national mythmaking, but the film more or less flopped in the U.S, and Jackman hasn’t made a film in Australia again since. The lack of another homecoming might circle back around to the fact that he only made two films here before his American conversion. Where other actors in his position, like Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, have certainly returned home to help out local filmmakers that they had connections to, or in order to support the local industry more broadly, Jackman perhaps never felt he owed his home country the same dues.



In 2009, when anticipating that year’s Oscars which Jackman would memorably host, the American film critic Dana Stevens joked that she liked to call him ‘Huge Ackman’. Stevens’ homophone, written in an epistolary wrap-up of the previous year’s films to fellow critics, was in part to point out what she saw as Jackman’s indistinctness:
“…he’s always had, to me, the same strangely rubberized quality as Kim Basinger or early Richard Gere; if you sliced him down the middle, he’d be the same consistency all the way through, like a Barbie doll.


This plastic toy-like quality must derive from the fact that Jackman’s filmography is marked by repeat performances of a living action figure, but perhaps Stevens was right in suggesting that there is a kind of surface-level sheen to Jackman that blinds us to what would otherwise be memorable detail. The biographical facts of his life, for instance, don’t stick out like those of other actors. Until researching this essay I had completely erased from my mind that he had attended the same university as me, and had, in fact, graduated from the exact same degree. It felt like it took years before his affable friendships with the key players of the reigning American political nightmare, Rupert Murdoch and Ivanka Trump, were reported on. His neutral stance on such relationships has been self-pardoned by the fact that he doesn’t “talk politics at birthday parties” – a perspective that feels historically out-of-step with many of his Hollywood contemporaries. Dana Stevens also saw Jackman as an anachronistic throwback, questioning whether he might have plausibly appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, or have squired “Claudette Cobert to the Brown Derby?”

It might not be an obvious comparison, but I would suggest the closest contemporary to Jackman working today is surely the unimpeachable Tom Cruise. They seem to share some kind of similar internal processing hardware, the same chaotic devotion to pleasing audiences above anything else. They project the same relentless affability in public appearances. They share the same unwavering belief in the good of franchises, and the same dedication to pushing bodily extremes. Like Cruise, Jackman has only made a couple of serious attempts at playing against type in darker fare, in the now practically nonexistent thriller Deception (2008) and in Denis Villeneuve’s American debut Prisoners (2013), a self-serious ‘missing child’ awards season player that hides the deliciously nutty melodrama at its core.

Nowhere was this connection between the two actors clearer than the scene Jackman caused at Oprah’s Australian farewell tour. Four years earlier, Cruise had torpedoed his own career by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. Jackman’s subconscious mind seemingly tried to one-up Cruise by jumping off the top of the Sydney Opera House, sailing down a flying fox before smashing into a lighting rig at the top of the stage where he was supposed to gracefully alight, and instead nearly cut his eye open. This wrongheaded gameness extends to grotesque extremes in the unwanted sketch anthology movie Movie 43 (2013), in which Jackman wears a prosthetic scrotum glued to his neck, and Kate Winslet tries to keep a straight face as his beleaguered scene partner. Such is the fate of the song and dance man; he’ll tap to the beat you give him, and beat you to any joke you can make about him.


The quasi-mythology of Jackman’s career isn’t complete, of course, without pointing to his musical theatre background, or his time spent on Broadway, in particular his portrayal of Peter Allen in the jukebox musical, The Boy From Oz, a role for which he won Best Leading Actor in a Musical at the 2004 Tony Awards. Allen, a fellow Australian who also practically disappeared into the American cultural lexicon (despite being well known for singing longingly about his home country) was a perfect fit for Jackman. It is not that, like Allen, Jackman is un-Australian (an undeniably fraudulent category), but rather that he is very Australian indeed ― but more than happy to shed his cultural markers to please America, while making a healthy profit from her, too (indeed, Jackman took the role from its original star Todd McKenney for the Broadway production). Likewise, Peter Allen’s broad, camp theatrics let Jackman play to the back of the room ― one has to imagine that this ability to sell anything in which one appears is derived from the cultivated charms that go along with perfecting theatre of this kind.

The bifurcated nature of Jackman’s career has meant that he has had access to a greater range of publicity opportunities than other actors. A particularly savvy Reddit user posted a photograph of two magazines – Muscle & Fitness and Good Housekeeping – with Jackman on the cover exhibiting ‘the difference between marketing for men and women’.



Apart from the criticism of gendered media bias, what is clear here is that Jackman is something of a living translation of the ‘Get you a man who can do both’ meme. He is both the tough man and the soft touch, and this, of course, speaks to a supposedly desirable and marketable form of contemporary masculinity. The delineations, for one, are simply too neat, and the ‘Nice Guy / übermensch’ hybrid airbrushes out the messy complications of real life.

The broad appeal of Jackman’s mass marketing has also, of course, led to the indistinctness that Dana Stevens grappled with ten years ago. Part of the hefty dramatic weight of his final outing as Wolverine in Logan (2017), carried in the movies final moments as a once invincible character finally died, was surely a sigh of relief from audiences that Jackman was finally freed from the demanding 17 year project (finally retiring the diet of plain chicken breast and brown rice, alongside the unhealthy promotion of intermittent fasting sold by men’s magazines). Although, his superhuman efforts are not quite done: having already played cavernous venues like Madison Square Garden, Jackman is set to perform for an audience of 21,000, at each of the five shows – two in one day! – at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena.

The merging of Jackman’s musical and dramatic acting styles would finally cohere in his worthy performance as Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper’s otherwise turgid Les Miserables (2012). That was my thinking, at least, until seeing Jackman fully inhabit himself in The Greatest Showman. My wife and I walked past a bus stop ad for the film on New Year’s Day in 2018 as we carried ourselves to the cinemas while nursing twin hangovers. We were undecided about what to see in the dark, and I had only the slightest intuition that The Greatest Showman might provide some relief. From the opening number, we embarrassingly and uncontrollably sobbed through every song. Inasmuch as hangovers have special qualities, they have a powerful capacity to completely distort your emotional register, opening you up to being more emotionally vulnerable than usual ― more open to, say, enjoying a film about a con artist and his all-singing, all-dancing crew of circus performers (and one which whitewashes darker historical facts about its lead character).

We went back a week later, like many others, to see it again. The film, with all its extremes of glossy pop, serves as a sugary rush and, for practical purposes, invites comforting replays. Which is to say, it does the job and then some. Indeed, repeat viewings were key to the film’s overall box office success; in America the film made a rare increase from its opening weekend to its next, jumping a record 76%, the highest ever for a film shown on more than 3000 screens.


Leaving the cinema after watching The Greatest Showman for a third time, I could not help but appreciate it as more than just a highly airbrushed biography of P.T. Barnum. In my mind, it simply played as ‘The Story of Hugh Jackman as Told By Hugh Jackman.’ There was the great joy of watching someone hit the notes only they can hit. It’s The Greatest Showman, after all, more than any other role, that seems to have prompted a demand for a stadium tour, although Jackman had toured a smaller, medley driven version of it before as Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway. Perhaps, for Jackman, there was simply the added promise of living a little longer in the role that must have felt like a second skin. The auto-nostalgia of this phase is also understandable in the wake of two final Wolverine films that were almost exclusively and morbidly preoccupied with mortality.

In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), Russell Crowe’s Maximus gives us the famous line, ‘are you not entertained?’, with spectatorship (and anti-spectatorship) in mind. You get the feeling the line should somehow belong to Jackman instead. Crowe threw out the question in spite, unimpressed by his own audience, whereas a Jackman reading might sound more like he’s asking if you would like another cocktail, another canapé, another go at watching him dance atop the pool table. In everything he does, he genuinely seems to care if you’re having a good time. It might not necessarily be a quality that makes for a great actor, but it is one that makes for a peerless entertainer.

Such nonstop enthusiasm has meant that Jackman has been immune to most forms of criticism, which has, perhaps, denied him convincing biographical portraiture too. But what does that matter? In August, in stadiums around Australia, Jackman will stand on stage alone, enveloped by the empty air of oversized arenas, and we’ll get to see exactly how he wants to author the story of his own career.

**********
Sam Twyford-Moore is the author of The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania, which was released by NewSouth Publishing in 2018.

Presumably, he has not also seen Hugh's straight plays on Broadway - where he is acting very much against this author's perceived Jackman acting profile ( an alpha male cop who falls into a physical, mental, and emotional abyss in A STEADY RAIN...nor as the enigmatic fisherman of fish and loves in Butterworth's THE RIVER )…


Nor in such movies like THE FOUNTAIN of Aronofsky (with its full acting range challenge in a trifecta of roles), or THE FRONT RUNNER of Reitman ( with its challenge of a real portraiture of a man caught in a political downfall).

The author simply chooses the early film options to Hugh Jackman and even shows a cynical attitude towards LOGAN (which received an Oscar nod for its adapted screenplay and hailed by many as the best superhero movie of all time).

Talking about Wolverine -- the real talent scout for Hugh Jackman being chosen as Wolverine was not Russell Crowe ( he put in a good word for Hugh, but that is it). It was XMen producer Lauren Shuler Donner who saw him in OKLAHOMA! and suggested him as the replacement for the ailing Dougray Scott! Lauren continued to produce all Hugh XMen-movies, including LOGAN!

His mention that Hugh only truly cared for Australia by being in the Luhrmann film of the same name and had never returned to his homeland to make movies. Ha - where did The Wolverine part-filming take place -- Sydney and an Australian island was used to portray Tokyo. Or Origins - where part of the filming was in New Zealand and part in Australia. While it never happened, The Greatest Showman was initially planned for a FOX-Sydney shoot (employing Australian talent). The author uses Cate Blanchett as more loyal to their homeland. Sorry for saying this -- Cate does not get as many big movie offers as Hugh Jackman! And where is Cate now? Didn't she leave Sydney and relocated north of the equator now?

Many Australia talent do not get Hollywood offers because they do not suit the kind of movies that Hollywood wants to make! Only actors like Chris Hemsworth has followed what Hugh has done, although his good fortune was that of being part of the Marvel franchises.

This author must be so jealous that someone has become a global success, rather than just a copy of Australians trying to get noticed in Hollywood but failing to make it big! Not only that, Australian Hugh has also conquered Broadway! And by the way, Hugh was first offered the role of Peter Allen ( not Todd M), as confirmed by the late producer Ben Gannon. Who does this author think would have seen TBFO had Todd M been the lead? It is even less likely that the show would have been produced on Broadway had Hugh Jackman not decided to be on it!


They loved him at the Oscars ( 2009) and in his current world tour because Hugh Jackman has become identified among the elite great all-around entertainers of current and past history! Take that, Mr. No-name Author!


Jo

[hughmanity]

Indeed it does.   The publication in which this nonsense appeared describes itself as "a newly established online film publication, run by a group of 'budding' critics..." Clearly this guy is writing just to stir up some "controversy" in the hopes of calling obviously needed attention to himself and the blog.  Ughh.

Jul 28, 2019 19:19:56 GMT -5 jo said:

I'm trying to appreciate the point of this article -- written before Hugh comes to Australian for a 26-date music tour in Australia!

It seems like the best example of Australia's Tall Poppy Syndrome

Huge Ackman: The Curious Case of Hugh Jackman’s Career
July 20, 2019 by Sam Twyford-Moore



In the 2001 romantic comedy Kate & Leopold, Hugh Jackman plays a duke living in the late 1800s who falls through an unexplained time portal. He awakens in the very early 21st century, relatively injury free, to find himself in the apartment above Kate McKay, a market researcher played by Meg Ryan. They strike up an unlikely romance and go through the usual fish-out-of-water motions such movies demand (my God, he doesn’t know how to use a toaster!). From there, the film is, literally, linearly regressive. The story actively punishes Kate for even daring to think about pursuing a career, sending her back to the 1870s at the film’s end so she can be with the beloved duke ― effectively rescinding every aspect of her civic life, including, most obviously, the right to vote.


Upon the release of Kate & Leopold, Jackman was largely given positive critical notices, distinctly separate from Ryan’s drubbings. He was singled out for acting convincingly enough as to sell the foundational concept of the film. Such praise for an actor only seems to arrive when the film in question is as weak in premise as Kate & Leopold; shouldn’t there be some kind of moral criticism of Jackman for acting straight faced in such obviously atavistic material, rather than being lauded for simply possessing the skills necessary to sell hokum? Maybe not. Maybe 2001 was actually a long time ago, now worthy of our forgiveness. Either way, Kate & Leopold would prove to be the last breath of Meg Ryan’s romantic comedy career ― she clearly, and very understandably, appeared to want out of the majority of the film’s runtime ― but it would also serve as an introduction to Hugh Jackman’s successful man-out-of-time routine, one that has extended to his own public image (bizarrely, Kate & Leopold would also signal the start of a successful partnership with director James Mangold, who would go on to collaborate closely with Jackman on the final two Wolverine films).


This tension between his public personality and his actorly persona shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given how much Jackman manages to wring out of his character in the early-career Kate & Leopold. Jackman is, seemingly, at his very best when you place him somewhere within the span of the 19th century. In both Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) and Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman (2017) he plays characters ― in the former a deranged magician, in the latter a huckster of a ringleader ― obsessed with the pursuit of spectacle and showmanship. Jackman has let those roles deliberately bleed into his own professional pursuits, spending most of his 2019 showing how much he has learnt from the salesmen he once played. Newly 50, he has been busy indeed unrolling an international set of stadium tours, all under the title Hugh Jackman ― The Man. The Music. The Show.



It might be telling that the clunky, declarative title doesn’t include The Actor in it, nor The Movies. Jackman seems to be positioning himself away from being considered as a great actor ― even though he sometimes really can be ― and is instead asking that you to read him as a cultural icon. Whatever its overall intentions, the enterprise ― and it is most certainly an enterprise ― signals the pomp and ceremony that Jackman is so good at serving up, at once serious and not.

The effort feels carried along by the fact of its very unlikeliness. Jackman has, in reality, only been on cinema screens for 20 years, and the notion of a stadium show feels like the kind of monumental, self-reflecting victory lap earned by someone who has spent much longer in our collective memories. The venture certainly risks his film legacy being reduced into wholesale product; he’s aware that there are, perhaps, people who only want to buy one thing from him: the malleable machismo of one James ‘Logan’ Howlett. From (practically unwatchable) leaked footage of the performances staged so far, Jackman appears accompanied by a montage of his past roles, as he operatically sings ‘The Greatest Show’, the almost titular track The Greatest Showman, and quips that if any audience members have come only knowing him from playing Wolverine, it might prove to be a long night for them.



As an actor, Jackman was almost completely unknown to mainstream audiences when he was introduced as Wolverine in the U.S. summer blockbuster season of 2000 in the unexpected hit X-Men (it was unlikely that he would have even registered that well with Australian viewers at the time). There’s an added layer of perversity to this: the rapid rise of his career in America was based almost solely on dumb luck. Scottish actor Dougray Scott was supposed to play the Wolverine role, but got caught up in delays on the Australian set of John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 (2000). Jackman was only given the chance to audition after being recommended by Russell Crowe, who, having turned down the role himself, had called director Bryan Singer to make the case for his fellow countryman. Jackman was at the time starring in a revival production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!, and had to go through nine auditions to secure the role, including attending one interview in a baseball cap, tamping down the perm he was wearing in order to play Curly McLain on stage. His commitment was duly noted.


Rewatching that first X-Men movie now, he is far more soft-featured than you remember; an uncanny experience, if only because the defining characteristic of that superhero is being grizzled. Jackman has described his own uncertainty when starting out in the role, understandable given the haste of his casting, and the outlandish, intimidating size of the players around him, including British theatre greats Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. After X-Men cemented his Hollywood status, however, he joined their stature, and was speedily cast in a number of roles intended as big swings. The results weren’t great, given that they include the grotty and confused post-Matrix hacker film Swordfish (2001) [if you wanted to see a blonde-tipped Hugh Jackman get a forced blowjob while being held at gunpoint, then this is the viciously empty film for you!] and a further attempt at a wolf-adjacent franchise in the overcooked Dracula revamp Van Helsing (2004). It seems that at some point after those lukewarm efforts, Jackman settled on following through with Wolverine’s franchise success, allegedly turning down the lucrative role of James Bond to focus on one franchise.

The American film and cultural critic Karen Han is partly known for her tongue-in-cheek ‘Karen’s Boys’ ― a makeshift category of male actors who, while not conventionally handsome, she believes to be worthy of being a ‘crush’. Han has edited two montage videos set to Charli XCX’s 2017 pop hit Boys featuring those deemed worthy of admission to her curated collection ― chief among them are Ben Mendelsohn and Noah Taylor, an informal distinction that posits both Australian actors as slightly cult figures, as opposed to mainstream break-outs like Russell Crowe or Guy Pearce, or, indeed, Hugh Jackman.

Inspired by Han, and her love for Mendelsohn in particular (and a little thirsty myself maybe), I decided, as a lark, to edit together my own version ― using only Australian actors in films set in Australia, or in films made by Australian directors. It somehow never even occurred to me to include Jackman in it. This could partly come down to the fact that Jackman is simply too conventionally handsome to be included within Han’s broad, underdog-championing guidelines, but then someone like Pearce did make the cut ― although Pearce has actively resisted the kind of casting that goes along with his level of good looks, whereas Jackman has leant into his. I would suggest, however, that Jackman’s absence in my mind in this experiment largely came from the fact that he just isn’t in many Australian films, and his cultural presence isn’t associated directly with Australian cinema.



Indeed, Jackman only had two pre-Wolverine Australian film credits to his name when he came into his American stardom. Those two films – Erskineville Kings and Paperback Hero – were both released in 1999 and the films again represented his two primary modes: one is an over-earnest family drama set in the inner west of Sydney, the other a cheesy romance. Jackman’s performances in both films are, respectively, vaguely threatening and charmingly vague. Erskineville Kings watches like an extended vanity project for its lead actor – and the writer of the film ― Marty Denniss, who, like Jackman, had graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and who, unlike Jackman, never appeared in another film. Undeniably, the movie plays more like an extended showreel for Jackman than an actual film (despite the fact that he doesn’t show up until half an hour in). The rest of the actors, including a baby-faced Joel Edgerton, come off as amateur at best, and first time director Alan White includes long takes of characters moodily walking between locations as clumsy scene transitions, which makes it feel like an undergraduate effort. That the film somehow managed to capture one of the biggest stars in Hollywood in the brief seconds before they became so is some kind of miracle at work.
Paperback Hero, meanwhile, is just as throwaway ― or at least as single-use ― as its title suggests. That film briefly seemed to set Jackman up for a future of romantic lead roles, confirmed by Kate & Leopold and the completely forgotten Someone Like You (2001), but he hasn’t since made a return to the genre. Indeed, Jackman’s career has been one of repetitions and refusals. Jackman didn’t return to Australia to make a film until, well, Australia in 2008 (unless you count his voice work in Happy Feet (2006) as an Elvis-singing penguin, which you probably shouldn’t). He was evidently returning a favour by replacing Russell Crowe in Baz Lurhmann’s chaotic, ham-fisted attempt at national mythmaking, but the film more or less flopped in the U.S, and Jackman hasn’t made a film in Australia again since. The lack of another homecoming might circle back around to the fact that he only made two films here before his American conversion. Where other actors in his position, like Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, have certainly returned home to help out local filmmakers that they had connections to, or in order to support the local industry more broadly, Jackman perhaps never felt he owed his home country the same dues.



In 2009, when anticipating that year’s Oscars which Jackman would memorably host, the American film critic Dana Stevens joked that she liked to call him ‘Huge Ackman’. Stevens’ homophone, written in an epistolary wrap-up of the previous year’s films to fellow critics, was in part to point out what she saw as Jackman’s indistinctness:
“…he’s always had, to me, the same strangely rubberized quality as Kim Basinger or early Richard Gere; if you sliced him down the middle, he’d be the same consistency all the way through, like a Barbie doll.


This plastic toy-like quality must derive from the fact that Jackman’s filmography is marked by repeat performances of a living action figure, but perhaps Stevens was right in suggesting that there is a kind of surface-level sheen to Jackman that blinds us to what would otherwise be memorable detail. The biographical facts of his life, for instance, don’t stick out like those of other actors. Until researching this essay I had completely erased from my mind that he had attended the same university as me, and had, in fact, graduated from the exact same degree. It felt like it took years before his affable friendships with the key players of the reigning American political nightmare, Rupert Murdoch and Ivanka Trump, were reported on. His neutral stance on such relationships has been self-pardoned by the fact that he doesn’t “talk politics at birthday parties” – a perspective that feels historically out-of-step with many of his Hollywood contemporaries. Dana Stevens also saw Jackman as an anachronistic throwback, questioning whether he might have plausibly appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, or have squired “Claudette Cobert to the Brown Derby?”

It might not be an obvious comparison, but I would suggest the closest contemporary to Jackman working today is surely the unimpeachable Tom Cruise. They seem to share some kind of similar internal processing hardware, the same chaotic devotion to pleasing audiences above anything else. They project the same relentless affability in public appearances. They share the same unwavering belief in the good of franchises, and the same dedication to pushing bodily extremes. Like Cruise, Jackman has only made a couple of serious attempts at playing against type in darker fare, in the now practically nonexistent thriller Deception (2008) and in Denis Villeneuve’s American debut Prisoners (2013), a self-serious ‘missing child’ awards season player that hides the deliciously nutty melodrama at its core.

Nowhere was this connection between the two actors clearer than the scene Jackman caused at Oprah’s Australian farewell tour. Four years earlier, Cruise had torpedoed his own career by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch. Jackman’s subconscious mind seemingly tried to one-up Cruise by jumping off the top of the Sydney Opera House, sailing down a flying fox before smashing into a lighting rig at the top of the stage where he was supposed to gracefully alight, and instead nearly cut his eye open. This wrongheaded gameness extends to grotesque extremes in the unwanted sketch anthology movie Movie 43 (2013), in which Jackman wears a prosthetic scrotum glued to his neck, and Kate Winslet tries to keep a straight face as his beleaguered scene partner. Such is the fate of the song and dance man; he’ll tap to the beat you give him, and beat you to any joke you can make about him.


The quasi-mythology of Jackman’s career isn’t complete, of course, without pointing to his musical theatre background, or his time spent on Broadway, in particular his portrayal of Peter Allen in the jukebox musical, The Boy From Oz, a role for which he won Best Leading Actor in a Musical at the 2004 Tony Awards. Allen, a fellow Australian who also practically disappeared into the American cultural lexicon (despite being well known for singing longingly about his home country) was a perfect fit for Jackman. It is not that, like Allen, Jackman is un-Australian (an undeniably fraudulent category), but rather that he is very Australian indeed ― but more than happy to shed his cultural markers to please America, while making a healthy profit from her, too (indeed, Jackman took the role from its original star Todd McKenney for the Broadway production). Likewise, Peter Allen’s broad, camp theatrics let Jackman play to the back of the room ― one has to imagine that this ability to sell anything in which one appears is derived from the cultivated charms that go along with perfecting theatre of this kind.

The bifurcated nature of Jackman’s career has meant that he has had access to a greater range of publicity opportunities than other actors. A particularly savvy Reddit user posted a photograph of two magazines – Muscle & Fitness and Good Housekeeping – with Jackman on the cover exhibiting ‘the difference between marketing for men and women’.



Apart from the criticism of gendered media bias, what is clear here is that Jackman is something of a living translation of the ‘Get you a man who can do both’ meme. He is both the tough man and the soft touch, and this, of course, speaks to a supposedly desirable and marketable form of contemporary masculinity. The delineations, for one, are simply too neat, and the ‘Nice Guy / übermensch’ hybrid airbrushes out the messy complications of real life.

The broad appeal of Jackman’s mass marketing has also, of course, led to the indistinctness that Dana Stevens grappled with ten years ago. Part of the hefty dramatic weight of his final outing as Wolverine in Logan (2017), carried in the movies final moments as a once invincible character finally died, was surely a sigh of relief from audiences that Jackman was finally freed from the demanding 17 year project (finally retiring the diet of plain chicken breast and brown rice, alongside the unhealthy promotion of intermittent fasting sold by men’s magazines). Although, his superhuman efforts are not quite done: having already played cavernous venues like Madison Square Garden, Jackman is set to perform for an audience of 21,000, at each of the five shows – two in one day! – at Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena.

The merging of Jackman’s musical and dramatic acting styles would finally cohere in his worthy performance as Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper’s otherwise turgid Les Miserables (2012). That was my thinking, at least, until seeing Jackman fully inhabit himself in The Greatest Showman. My wife and I walked past a bus stop ad for the film on New Year’s Day in 2018 as we carried ourselves to the cinemas while nursing twin hangovers. We were undecided about what to see in the dark, and I had only the slightest intuition that The Greatest Showman might provide some relief. From the opening number, we embarrassingly and uncontrollably sobbed through every song. Inasmuch as hangovers have special qualities, they have a powerful capacity to completely distort your emotional register, opening you up to being more emotionally vulnerable than usual ― more open to, say, enjoying a film about a con artist and his all-singing, all-dancing crew of circus performers (and one which whitewashes darker historical facts about its lead character).

We went back a week later, like many others, to see it again. The film, with all its extremes of glossy pop, serves as a sugary rush and, for practical purposes, invites comforting replays. Which is to say, it does the job and then some. Indeed, repeat viewings were key to the film’s overall box office success; in America the film made a rare increase from its opening weekend to its next, jumping a record 76%, the highest ever for a film shown on more than 3000 screens.


Leaving the cinema after watching The Greatest Showman for a third time, I could not help but appreciate it as more than just a highly airbrushed biography of P.T. Barnum. In my mind, it simply played as ‘The Story of Hugh Jackman as Told By Hugh Jackman.’ There was the great joy of watching someone hit the notes only they can hit. It’s The Greatest Showman, after all, more than any other role, that seems to have prompted a demand for a stadium tour, although Jackman had toured a smaller, medley driven version of it before as Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway. Perhaps, for Jackman, there was simply the added promise of living a little longer in the role that must have felt like a second skin. The auto-nostalgia of this phase is also understandable in the wake of two final Wolverine films that were almost exclusively and morbidly preoccupied with mortality.

In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), Russell Crowe’s Maximus gives us the famous line, ‘are you not entertained?’, with spectatorship (and anti-spectatorship) in mind. You get the feeling the line should somehow belong to Jackman instead. Crowe threw out the question in spite, unimpressed by his own audience, whereas a Jackman reading might sound more like he’s asking if you would like another cocktail, another canapé, another go at watching him dance atop the pool table. In everything he does, he genuinely seems to care if you’re having a good time. It might not necessarily be a quality that makes for a great actor, but it is one that makes for a peerless entertainer.

Such nonstop enthusiasm has meant that Jackman has been immune to most forms of criticism, which has, perhaps, denied him convincing biographical portraiture too. But what does that matter? In August, in stadiums around Australia, Jackman will stand on stage alone, enveloped by the empty air of oversized arenas, and we’ll get to see exactly how he wants to author the story of his own career.

**********
Sam Twyford-Moore is the author of The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania, which was released by NewSouth Publishing in 2018.

Presumably, he has not also seen Hugh's straight plays on Broadway - where he is acting very much against this author's perceived Jackman acting profile ( an alpha male cop who falls into a physical, mental, and emotional abyss in A STEADY RAIN...nor as the enigmatic fisherman of fish and loves in Butterworth's THE RIVER )…


Nor in such movies like THE FOUNTAIN of Aronofsky (with its full acting range challenge in a trifecta of roles), or THE FRONT RUNNER of Reitman ( with its challenge of a real portraiture of a man caught in a political downfall).

The author simply chooses the early film options to Hugh Jackman and even shows a cynical attitude towards LOGAN (which received an Oscar nod for its adapted screenplay and hailed by many as the best superhero movie of all time).

Talking about Wolverine -- the real talent scout for Hugh Jackman being chosen as Wolverine was not Russell Crowe ( he put in a good word for Hugh, but that is it). It was XMen producer Lauren Shuler Donner who saw him in OKLAHOMA! and suggested him as the replacement for the ailing Dougray Scott! Lauren continued to produce all Hugh XMen-movies, including LOGAN!

His mention that Hugh only truly cared for Australia by being in the Luhrmann film of the same name and had never returned to his homeland to make movies. Ha - where did The Wolverine part-filming take place -- Sydney and an Australian island was used to portray Tokyo. Or Origins - where part of the filming was in New Zealand and part in Australia. While it never happened, The Greatest Showman was initially planned for a FOX-Sydney shoot (employing Australian talent). The author uses Cate Blanchett as more loyal to their homeland. Sorry for saying this -- Cate does not get as many big movie offers as Hugh Jackman! And where is Cate now? Didn't she leave Sydney and relocated north of the equator now?

Many Australia talent do not get Hollywood offers because they do not suit the kind of movies that Hollywood wants to make! Only actors like Chris Hemsworth has followed what Hugh has done, although his good fortune was that of being part of the Marvel franchises.

This author must be so jealous that someone has become a global success, rather than just a copy of Australians trying to get noticed in Hollywood but failing to make it big! Not only that, Australian Hugh has also conquered Broadway! And by the way, Hugh was first offered the role of Peter Allen ( not Todd M), as confirmed by the late producer Ben Gannon. Who does this author think would have seen TBFO had Todd M been the lead? It is even less likely that the show would have been produced on Broadway had Hugh Jackman not decided to be on it!


They loved him at the Oscars ( 2009) and in his current world tour because Hugh Jackman has become identified among the elite great all-around entertainers of current and past history! Take that, Mr. No-name Author!


Jo

[njr]

The “ailing Dougray Scott?” I thought the only reason he couldn’t do X-Men was because his filming on Mission: Impossible ran over. It was also released in 2000.

Nancy

[carouselkathy]

What is a "tall poppy syndrome"? The tone of this article seems to be that the author doesn't like (or resents) Hugh Jackman. Then he proceeds to explain why he doesn't like everything Hugh's done.....except maybe THE GREATEST SHOWMAN! It's hard to tell if the author doesn't like Hugh in general, or if he just doesn't approve of the career choices Hugh has made. It's a very long tirade. It can't be secretly written as a joke, because it's not funny.

[JH4HJ]

Jul 29, 2019 14:23:35 GMT -5 carouselkathy said:

What is a "tall poppy syndrome"?

Australian slang for the tendency to criticize highly successful people (ie, tall poppies), and 'cut them down'.

"Tall poppy syndrome describes aspects of a culture where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, strung up or criticized because they have been classified as superior to their peers. The term has been used in cultures of the English-speaking world."

[carouselkathy]

Someone wrote the article for attention and clicks. They're getting what they wished for here.

[jo]

If we all bought his book ( which I think was one reason for trying to get attention) then he might be succeeding in his purpose. But if by writing what he did he only draws negativity to his "budding" work as a film critic, then it has not served his interest. Also, if he has done real research on Hugh's total body of work ( and seemingly not just relied on media releases which are not always verified or are speculative or also biased), then maybe we could impute more objectivity on his part. When one wants to be a respected critic, one must look at the object of review with a critical eye based on certain accepted standards. It has nothing to do with liking or not liking the subject of a body of work. If he found something that is worth noting on the good side of Hugh Jackman's acting choices ( such as the acclaimed and Oscar-nominated LOGAN), then maybe we could view his piece as more objective ( but it is all a personal attack). Although he did say Hugh delivered a worthy portrayal but then calling the movie a turgid Les Miserables ( that is a seeming contradiction)… Look at the title of this piece -- it is already full of cynicism!

Btw, the real back story ( as told by one of the people directly involved in the filming of the first XMen movie) was that Bryan Singer was worried that Dougray Scott was taking a long time to get off from the Mission Impossible filming and sent the person over. The person found out when he got there that Dougray got seriously hurt from filming a motorcycle scene in MI and had not recovered and this was not disclosed to the Fox people.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/x-men-screenwriter-hugh-jackmans-wolverine-casting-drama-982045

Hugh Jackman replaced Dougray Scott as Wolverine several weeks into production. What's the story there?

[Then-Fox executive] Tom Rothman really wanted Dougray Scott to play Wolverine and he was shooting Mission: Impossible 2 and Tom Cruise kept calling Byran and saying, "We just need him a little while longer, a little while longer." We were starting to shoot and Wolverine was the lead and we didn't have him. Bryan suspected something was hinky, and so he sent the costume designer down to Australia, ostensibly to get wardrobe shots, but really it was to find out what was going on. What we found out was Dougray had been in a motorcycle accident filming the climax of MI2. He was pretty messed up. It was a real shame he couldn't do it. And Hugh had been somebody who had been in the mix earlier and it was [executive producer] Lauren Shuler Donner who said, "Why don't we bring him?"

Jo

[jo]

LOL --- critique-ing a critic here

The merging of Jackman’s musical and dramatic acting styles would finally cohere in his worthy performance as Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper’s otherwise turgid Les Miserables (2012).

That seems to be a bit contradictory.

If he thinks the whole movie is turgid ( excessively ornate or elaborate or bombastic) -- then Hugh's Valjean Soliloquy embodied one of its most ornate pieces ( the other one was probably I Dreamed A Dream). In this long sung-through piece showing Valjean going through the process of redemption ( Valjean's first Epiphany), we see the full range from wonder, realization, despair, and resolve embodied in that particular soliloquy! Hugh's would-have been "Oscar moment", as one filmgoer ( whose parents are both AMPAS and BAFTA voters) once said!


Jo

[jo]

Reposting this from the WORLD TOUR thread

Jul 29, 2019 19:31:09 GMT -5 jo said:

WOW!!!

Billboard reports on the tremendous success of the Hugh Jackman show ( #tmtmts)! Hey, Mr.No-Name, Aspiring-Critic-who-wrote-about-Huge-Ackman -- please read this article (Sorry, my bias is showing )!


www.billboard.com/articles/business/touring/8523872/hugh-jackman-the-man-the-music-the-show-tour-aeg-interview?curator=MusicREDEF

TOURING

AEG on Why Hugh Jackman's Arena Tour Can't Be Duplicated: 'People Will Lose a Lot of Money Trying'
7/29/2019 by Taylor Mims



Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for HJ
Hugh Jackman performs onstage during Hugh Jackman The Man. The Music. The Show. at Madison Square Garden on June 29, 2019 in New York City.


Hugh Jackman's The Man. The Music. The Show. tour has been the surprise boxscore hit of the season. The actor, singer and dancer pulled in an impressive $27 million across 17 shows in the month of June alone with a set that features songs from the movies and musicals Jackman has starred in, including The Greatest Showman, Les Misérables and The Boy From Oz.

“It is unprecedented. A lot of us would count this as the biggest surprise of our career,” says AEG Presents senior vp global touring Rich Schaefer. “The U.K. and Europe went on sale before the U.S. did. I remember I woke up at four in the morning and got on the phone with [AEG Presents U.K.’s] Toby Leighton-Pope, whom we did this tour with. I said. ‘How are we doing?’ And he said, ‘It’s insane.’ ”


In June, The Man. The Music. The Show. -- which kicked off in May and has dates scheduled internationally through October -- sold nearly 230,000 tickets, including a six-show run at the O2 Arena in London June 2-7 that brought in about $7.5 million. The mini-residency earned Jackman the No. 8 spot on Top Boxscores and helped secure AEG Presents the No. 2 position on Top Promoters. Schaefer shares how Jackman pulled it off.



With no other programming like this on the market, how did you think this show would fare?

I thought it would do great, but I don’t think anyone thought it would do what it did. We did three Madison Square Garden shows in two days. We did three Birmingham and Manchester Arenas [in England]. We did matinees. I remember seeing Hugh, and he said, “I can’t believe we sold out two Madison Square Gardens on the on-sale.” We had expectations, and it blew past the expectations.



Many tours don’t host matinees. How did that come about?

His team said he could do a matinee if we got it. So we started doing Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday night in different markets. The [audience] at the Garden was probably a little bit older and a little bit younger than the other shows, but it may have been the best of the three.

Hugh’s a worker. I’ve managed bands my whole career, and I’ve never seen someone do six shows in five days. We did that in the Northeast recently. He is trained for this. He doesn’t go out late and party. He is very disciplined and delivers onstage for the people who are paying.



What do Jackman’s matinee shows say about the audience he is bringing in?

You couldn’t do that with a traditional pop act. I don’t think their audience would want to come at one o’clock on a Saturday. It speaks to just how diverse his audience is. There were a lot of families at that show. It’s kids, it’s parents. It’s gay, it’s straight. It’s date night, girls’ night out, boys’ night out.



Having an actor tour with music from his films is a new concept. Do you think other promoters will put together more shows like this?

I can tell you that a lot of people will lose a lot of money trying. I’m sure we’ll play around with the concept and see if there are other things that make sense, but there’s really not another person like this that is so multifaceted and can do what he does at such a high level.



This article originally appeared in the July 27 issue of Billboard.


© 2019 Billboard. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Policy About Our Ads Advertising
Billboard is a subsidiary of Prometheus Global Media, LLC.

Talent, professional discipline, and the joy of performing

Who could ask for anything more 🎵


Jo

[jo]

It speaks to just how diverse his audience is. There were a lot of families at that show. It’s kids, it’s parents. It’s gay, it’s straight. It’s date night, girls’ night out, boys’ night out.

Mr. Critic --

The secret to being a respected performer is not simply choosing a wide diversity of material on many subjects of public interest...but also in knowing what the market wants to see!

Jo

[jo]

[jo]

An interview with CNN just as when The Greatest Showman was beginning to make BIG waves, after a difficult first opening week, followed by surprising show of legs!


edition.cnn.com/2018/02/21/entertainment/hugh-jackman-creators/index.html?no-st=1566972075


Hugh looks at acting as true creative process!

[jo]

Posting this again, this time on this thread --

Aug 28, 2019 22:42:59 GMT -5 jo said:

How true -- one can discern them mostly on social media messages, especially now that his music tour is reinforcing his image of being a song and dance man!

There were many remarkable memories of Hugh Jackman playing the role of Wolverine - altogether 9 times (including a solo trilogy and 2 cameos) -- sad that some do not know or fully appreciate the body of work he has done here. To me, the most telling admiration come from fans who say " he represented my childhood" and continuing to appreciate his work even when they have grown into adulthood. Now, there is a continuing desire to see Hugh return to the role, even if only for one last time! Plus the many, many objections to any suggestion of a recasting of the role. That is how indelible his work on the Wolverine saga has been stamped in the minds of fanboys and fangirls...and any other fan who discovered Hugh Jackman via the Wolverine portrayals!

The emerging foray into drama is also noted. There was The Fountain first, then The Prestige, Prisoners (even Les Misérables, to some extent) all proofs that Hugh Jackman is also a first-class dramatic actor. His newer work lean towards this genre - The FrontRunner, Bad Education and Reminiscence! There is hope that he will eventually be recognized for this kind of work ( through an Oscar win, which will complete his EGOT stature). Interestingly, this is the kind of acting training that he underwent - a dramatic course at WAAPA! One of his bucket list wishes is to do a classical play ( work of The Bard) on stage!

Of course, musical theatre is also in his blood! He is supposed to have committed to a yearlong run for THE MUSIC MAN. Even TheManTheMusicTheShow is, in essence, a theatre show ( narrative and music blending well together...as they both advance his personal retrospective). I may be wrong, but I think there might be some misconception that what he wants is to be a concert stage artist ( so many asking him to return to the concert formats again and again). That Rockstar dream seems more like a bucket list wish fulfilled! If I recall right, he has always talked in the past on how he wanted to create a show ( not necessarily a concert) with music he has worked with and music that is in his memory cells - so it has always been from the focal point of a retrospective! Nothing more! If he revisits the format, maybe it is to add to his personal retrospective?

Of course The Greatest Showman created a totally unexpected impact on the public's perception of his talent. To old-time fans - it really confirmed that Hugh Jackman is arguably the most versatile actor/performer around - film, theatre...and now even the concert stage.

Hope the EGOT stature comes soon -- he truly deserves that accolade and recognition!!


Jo