The Music Man : Fan Page

[jo]

[jo]

[njr]

Paul McCartney has been writing the music for a stage adaptation of “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Was supposed to open the end of 2020, but the pandemic put the kibosh on that.
www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jul/18/paul-mccartney-stage-musical-its-a-wonderful-life-frank-capra-lee-hall-billy-elliot-beatle

Nancy

[jo]

I came upon this review ( linked on Twitter) by a drama critic of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL of a recent production of The Music Man.

‘The Music Man’ Review: Trouble in Eden

Goodspeed Musicals revives Meredith Willson’s 1957 story of a small Iowa town turned inside out by the coming of a charismatic traveling salesman.

By Terry Teachout
May 16, 2019 1:59 pm ET


Is there a Great American Musical, a show that embodies the historic values of our country and our culture while simultaneously acknowledging their myriad contradictions? Indeed there is—and it’s not the one that you’re expecting, either. Instead of “Oklahoma!” or “West Side Story,” or even “Hamilton,” my pick for the prize is “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson’s 1957 fairy tale about a small town that is turned inside out by the coming of a charismatic traveling salesman who proposes to stem the rising tide of adolescent discontent in River City, Iowa, by putting together a boys’ band.


The Music Man

Goodspeed Musicals, Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam, Conn.
$29-$79, 860-873-8668, closes June 20


Unselfconsciously nostalgic to the point of corniness yet at the same time emotionally complex, “The Music Man” is a masterpiece not generally recognized as such, and Connecticut’s Goodspeed Musicals has given it a production that makes the most of its old-fashioned charms. Jenn Thompson’s unpretentiously imaginative staging, in which Edward Watts and Ellie Fishman play to perfection the lead roles that were created on Broadway by Robert Preston and Barbara Cook, vacuums the choking cobwebs of convention off a too-familiar warhorse. The result is the best stage production of “The Music Man” I’ve ever seen, one comparable in quality to the show’s justly admired 1962 screen adaptation.

What most revivals of “The Music Man” overlook are the hints of loneliness and despair that make it far more than just an affectionate exercise in small-town charm. For all its Edenic innocence, River City in 1912 is also a community full of censorious busybodies who can and do make life tough for those who refuse to toe the line of convention. That’s why the bookish, Balzac-loving Marian (Ms. Fishman) and Winthrop ( Alexander O’Brien ), her shy brother, are both constrictingly inhibited and agonizingly unhappy, while Harold Hill (Mr. Watts), the uninhibited con man who introduces them and the rest of River City to a more abundant life, comes within half a hair’s breadth of being tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail for his troubles. One might almost be watching an exceptionally dark production of “Our Town.”




Ms. Thompson is fully alive to these nuances. Here, as in all of her work, she penetrates to the inner truth of “The Music Man,” but does so without resorting to the over-obvious point-making that blights Daniel Fish’s “woke” Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” Rather than bang you over the head with the show’s deeper meanings, she pays you the compliment of letting you uncover them for yourself. Nothing is exaggerated, not even Winthrop’s blush-making lisp, just as Ms. Thompson’s thoroughly nontraditional casting (among other things, the white mayor of River City has a black wife and daughter) is not italicized but taken for granted.


Mr. Watts wisely makes a point of not basing his performance on that of Preston, whose delectably fraudulent Harold Hill was preserved for all time in Morton DaCosta’s film version of “The Music Man.” Instead of running off a Xerox copy of Mr. Preston, as Craig Bierko did in Susan Stroman’s 2000 Broadway revival, Mr. Watts is engaging and affable, hiding his bad intentions as opposed to letting them ooze out of every pore. Similarly, Ms. Fishman’s Marian, far from being too good to be true, is anxious, even a touch vinegary. She knows life is passing her by, which makes you want to cheer when she finally stops playing it safe and puts her heart in the suspect hands of Harold—who is in turn redeemed by her love.



Ms. Thompson and her cast are well supported by the sets of Paul Tate dePoo III, who uses every inch of Goodspeed’s unforgivingly shallow stage without ever letting the production look crowded. In a masterstroke of creative design, he’s even painted a Grant Wood-like Iowa landscape onto the brick back wall. No less resourceful is the choreography of Patricia Wilcox, who first caught my eye with Ms. Thompson’s 2016 Goodspeed revival of “Bye Bye Birdie.” Given the minuscule size of the Goodspeed Opera House, which has 398 seats and a 27-by-22-foot stage, all of its productions are by definition small-scale shows, but Ms. Wilcox’s propulsive dances make this one feel twice as big. Likewise Ms. Thompson’s staging, which spills out into the aisles to excitingly expansive effect.


For the record, two higher-profile productions of “The Music Man” are now in the pipeline, the first directed by Mary Zimmerman for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre (where it will open in July) and the second a 2020 Broadway revival directed by Jerry Zaks and starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. Promising though they both sound, they’ll have to be truly exceptional to measure up to this one.


—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author, most recently, of “Billy and Me.” Write to him at [e-mail].

He mentions the insights on the musical itself that makes it stand out ( I am not referring to necessarily to how good the production he reviewed is).

I do think that the musical is more than just light entertainment. It was a show that won the TONY over West Side Story, probably due to hidden insights of human behavior of many of the characters  ( In WSS, there were few deep insights into each character). It is a well-thought picture of a slice of small-town Americana -- which human traits are likely still present today but viewed with the different lens of modern times.


Jo

[jo]

I will repost the above and this detailed discussion on Meredith Willson's contribution to musical theatre to the thread on SHOW DEVELOPMENT ... together with the above review. Both articles give deep insights on how a new revival need to find a way to emphasize the true assets of such an artistic creation beyond the musical score and spectacular production numbers --

www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/terry-teachout/the-man-behind-the-music-man/

APRIL 2012 ART

The Man Behind The Music Man
Who Was Meredith Willson?
by Terry Teachout


One of a bare handful of hit Broadway musicals to have been written in its entirety by a single person, The Music Man opened to rave reviews in 1957, beat out West Side Story at the Tony Awards, and ran for 1,375 performances. Then it was turned into one of the most popular Hollywood musicals ever filmed. The story of a smooth-talking con man who breezes into a hick town to swindle its residents and ends up losing his heart to the local librarian was successfully revived on Broadway in 2000, filmed a second time for TV in 2003, and continues to be performed regularly by regional and amateur theater companies throughout America.

Why, then, is Meredith Willson—the author of its libretto and music and lyrics—so completely forgotten? Because nothing he did before or after The Music Man was of lasting interest. Willson (surely one of the last males in America to carry the first name of Meredith) was 55 years old when The Music Man premiered, and the two musicals that followed it, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960) and Here’s Love (1962), were successful in their day but have since failed to hold the stage. (The peculiarly unmusical movie version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, with Debbie Reynolds as a brassy survivor of the Titanic, was a big hit, but it dispensed with most of the score, featuring only six of Willson’s songs.) Willson also wrote the music for one film of note, William Wyler’s 1941 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, but his score was undistinguished. Only one of his non-theatrical songs, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” continues to be sung, and except for the ubiquitous “Seventy-Six Trombones,” none of the numbers from The Music Man quite established itself as a standard (although “Till There Was You” came close).

Willson was, in other words, a one-hit wonder, and the immense and enduring popularity of his hit, coupled with the fact that he was by all accounts exceedingly likable and seems to have led a blameless private life, has had the unexpected effect of blotting out any lasting memories of the man who wrote it.

Fortunately, he also published a pair of anecdotal memoirs, And There I Stood with My Piccolo (1948) and “But He Doesn’t Know the Territory” (1959), in which he tells the story of his life up through the opening night of The Music Man. These charmingly breezy books, which went out of print long ago, were republished without fanfare by University of Minnesota Press in 2009 and are now available in paperback. They tell the story of a singularly eventful professional life—making clear in the process that The Music Man, while not literally autobiographical, was nonetheless deeply rooted in the details of Willson’s own childhood and youth.

Born in 1902, Willson came to New York at the age of 17 to study with the legendary French flutist Georges Barrère. He then spent three years with John Philip Sousa’s band and in 1924 joined the New York Philharmonic, subsequently playing under such conductors as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Willem Mengelberg, and Arturo Toscanini.

What is all the more surprising about these youthful achievements is that Willson came from the most inartistic and unselfconsciously provincial of backgrounds: an Iowa town called Mason City. To read the opening chapter of And There I Stood with My Piccolo, published nine years before The Music Man opened on Broadway, is to realize at once that the “River City” of The Music Man, with its “Iowa-stubborn” citizens who blanch at the thought that their children might inadvertently stumble across the novels of Balzac in the public library, is a barely fictionalized portrait of Mason City.

That it should also be a fundamentally affectionate portrait says much about Willson himself, who would forever after think of his hometown as the Edenic land of lost material that he portrays with only the gentlest glints of irony in The Music Man: “How well I remember my first ice cream cone. ‘The man down at the corner by the bank sells ice cream in a little glass!’ And my first street carnival was all Ferris wheel and butterfly scarf dancers making swirls in colored lights.”

Hearing the Mason City Municipal Band inspired young Meredith to take up the flute—he claimed to have owned the first flute ever seen there, which his parents ordered for him from a mail-order house in Chicago—and in 1921, after just two years of study with Barrère, he became the principal flutist in Sousa’s band, going directly from there to the New York Philharmonic.

For most aspiring musicians, landing a job with the Philharmonic at the age of 22 would be the dream of a lifetime, and Willson tells of his triumph with self-deprecating delight in And There I Stood with My Piccolo. His portrayal of life with the famously temperamental Toscanini is especially vivid:

Like the troops on the transport ship in that famous cartoon who all marched overboard because their commanding officer was a stutterer and couldn’t manage to say “Halt!” any of us in Toscanini’s orchestra would have unquestioningly done the same, though as much from reasons of being afraid of him as of loving him.

But Willson, who had also played in dance bands and pit orchestras in Iowa and New York, aspired to be a composer. In 1929 he left the orchestra and moved to the West Coast to work in radio, quickly becoming the musical director of a San Francisco station. Within a few years he was living in Hollywood and conducting for such popular programs as Maxwell House Coffee Time, on which, in addition to leading the orchestra, he doubled as the comic stooge to George Burns and Gracie Allen.

After brief and modestly successful attempts to establish himself as a film composer and popular songwriter, Willson returned to the airwaves. In 1950 he became the musical director of The Big Show, a series starring Tallulah Bankhead and Fred Allen which was network radio’s last big-budget variety program. By then, TV was rapidly supplanting radio, and after The Big Show was canceled in 1951, the untelegenic Willson, finding it difficult to make the transition to the new medium, decided to try his hand at writing for the theater, hanging on to such work as was still available in radio in order to pay the bills.

Encouraged by his friend Frank Loesser and by Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin, the producing team that had brought Guys and Dolls to Broadway the year before, Willson resolved to put the Mason City of his youth on stage. The results seem so effortless that those unfamiliar with the complex process of creating a Broadway show will be startled to read Willson’s detailed account in “But He Doesn’t Know the Territory” of his six-year struggle to write The Music Man and bring it to the stage. Among other things, he admits to having written 40 different songs for the show, only 18 of which made it into the final script.

The plot of The Music Man, in which Harold Hill, a musical illiterate, passes himself off as an experienced bandmaster in order to defraud the citizens of River City by selling them instruments that he cannot teach their children how to play, is far from the only original and unprecedented aspect of this singular piece of work. Willson, who had never before written any kind of stage work, produced on his first try (albeit after much revision) a musical-comedy book that is technically impeccable to the point of virtuosity, not least in the way that it compresses the equivalent of an entire expository dialogue scene into the four-minute-long opening number, “Rock Island,” set on the train that brings Hill to River City.

That said, the score of The Music Man is the show’s most immediately engaging feature—even though “Ya Got Trouble,” Hill’s show-stopping introductory solo, dispenses not only with rhyme but also with melody, the lyrics spoken instead in rapid-fire patter. Willson was not a natural tunesmith, even though in “Till There Was You,” the confessional ballad sung to Hill by Marian Paroo, the lonely town librarian, he eked out a warm, expansive arch of melody that is reminiscent of Tchaikovsky in its straightforward warmth.

More often, his “tunes” are either functional vehicles for his lyrics or superbly knowing pastiches of turn-of-the-century popular-song genres. The most memorable example of Willson’s gifts as a pasticheur is “Seventy-Six Trombones,” whose tune sounds exactly like a trombone counter-melody from a Sousa march (and which, when slowed down and recast in waltz time, does double duty as the sweetly naive ballad “Goodnight, My Someone”).

Brooks Atkinson spoke for his colleagues in his New York Times review, calling The Music Man “a warm and genial cartoon of American life” and going on to say that “if Mark Twain could have collaborated with Vachel Lindsay, they might have devised a rhythmic lark like The Music Man, which is as American as apple pie and a Fourth of July oration.”

It is a tribute to the conceptual strength and theatrical soundness of The Music Man that most of its subsequent productions, including Susan Stroman’s 2000 Broadway revival, have made little or no attempt to deviate from the precedents established by Morton Da Costa, the show’s original director, and Robert Preston, who created the role of Harold Hill on Broadway and transferred his performance to the screen with exuberant aplomb.1

But The Music Man is more than just a cartoon. It is, to begin with, highly innovative in its use of unrhyming lyrics and parlando “speak-songs” (as Willson called them). Moreover, an imaginative director who takes The Music Man seriously, as Bill Rauch did in the nontraditionally cast production that he staged in 2009 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, can find in it overtones of loneliness and doubt that more traditional stagings usually overlook. (At its climax, Harold Hill is nearly set upon and lynched.)

Willson loved the real-life River City of his youth, but he needed no reminding that a town full of upright, censorious gossips who lead ultra-proper lives can make things hard for any citizen who begs to differ with them (We’re so by-God stubborn we can stand touchin’ noses/For a week at a time and never see eye to eye). And that’s the hinge on which The Music Man pivots: The bookish Marian is an outcast because she is unmarried and serious about literature, and it is Hill, the brash and dishonest outsider, who opens the eyes of the well-meaning but priggish townspeople to her worth—just as his musical ignorance doesn’t stop him from showing them that there’s nothing wrong with having a good time.

To see a production that underlines this subtext without hammering it into the ground is to be reminded that The Music Man is as evocative of small-town America in its essentially optimistic way as is Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s much darker study of the complexities of life in a closely knit community.

Willson would always be characteristically modest about his crowning achievement: “The existence of The Music Man proves Somerset Maugham’s contention that anybody with a good memory can write down a story. I remember my childhood so well that each character in the show is not one, but a composite of three or four different people.”

The degree to which the results embodied his personal experience—and used up the clay from which he could mold his art—was further demonstrated by the fact that he never again wrote an original musical-comedy book for Broadway. He collaborated with Richard Morris on The Unsinkable Molly Brown and adapted Here’s Love from the film Miracle on 34th Street, neither of which comes remotely near matching The Music Man in quality.

Clearly, Meredith Willson, like most amateur authors, had only one story to tell, that of his own childhood. But if you tell your story in the right way, you only need one, and with The Music Man he ensured for himself a lasting place in the annals of American theater. No other musical says so much about the homespun joys of life in turn-of-the-century America, or says it so endearingly. It is, in its unassuming way, a masterpiece of popular art, one that will surely continue to be performed for as long as Americans continue to believe in their own fundamental innocence—or long to recapture it.

1 Another reason for this faithfulness is that the film version of The Music Man, also directed by Da Costa, is one of the few Hollywood musicals to clearly suggest the potent theatrical impact of the original Broadway production on which it was based. As a result, most stage directors now use the film as a model for their own productions.



Terry Teachout is Commentary’s critic-at-large and the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his one-man play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

[jo]

Not sure if this is a serious post or simply to liven up the twitter conversation --

But thinking about seeing TheMusicMan or other happy Broadway musicals seem like a very positive incentive to get through this suffocating pandemic.

Jo

[jo]

Personally, what I found a bit plodding from the Preston movie version --

*the part featuring Mayor Shinn's wife's display of her group's artistic talents.

*maybe shorten the Shipoopi number - or contemporize the dance numbers.


The creative team will likely try to overcome the perception of the show being an old-fashioned story with old-fashioned production numbers. Also, with Hugh and Sutton, the creative team will likely rework parts of the book and the production numbers to take advantage of their talent and charisma.


Jo

[jo]

[jo]

I hoped I turned the twitter exchange into a more positive note.

[jo]

[jo]

LOL - sounds familiar

History repeating itself

[jo]

Someone opened a thread on BroadwayWorld message board on whether to support THE MUSIC MAN or not in view of the Scott Rudin controversy. Rudin has declared that he is stepping back from The Music Man, and he is also handing the producer reins to others for Book Of Mormon, West Side Story & To Kill A Mockingbird --


www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=1124965


I joined the thread. There were quite a few entries before mine which you may want to read (which shows the sentiments of these theatre fans). Good to see that there are more positive sentiments than otherwise.

If you post on BWW, you may also want to post your support of the show, with Hugh Jackman promising that they are now "rebuilding" the production without Scott Rudin.

jo
Send PM
Broadway Legend
joined:5/15/03
Guilt
#14
Posted: 4/24/21 at 9:23pm


I have never seen a show because it was produced by Scott Rudin. In some cases, I never even knew he was the lead or co-producer. I don't pore over every line of the Playbill, to tell the truth.

My tickets are intact for The Music Man - Rudin has never been my reason for wanting to see it. I follow Hugh Jackman's film and stage career ( I saw him first in the London Oklahoma! and did not even know who he was then) and he has proven his range, including musicals - theatre or film. When he was doing BackOnBroadway, one of the most applauded numbers was his re-enactment of the Rock Island opening number, singing the parts of all the salesmen. His joy of performing is always transmitted to audiences.

Hugh also has many advocacies, some of which relate to NYC. His Laughing Man Coffee venture with outlets in NYC supports fair trade for coffee farmers in Africa &South America. He is a founding organizer of the GlobalCitizen movement which had yearly CentralPark concerts before the pandemic. He is a longtime board member of the HarlemVillageAcademies for which he not only raised funds but also helped in teacher recruitment ( by doing a very funny ad for the school). More recently, he has been supporting individual health frontliners in his own way... More importantly, he has served the Broadway community thru fundraising for BroadwayCares/EFA, raising some $ 5.5 million if I am not mistaken over his 4 Broadway engagements as well as hosting 4 TONY awards shows. He is known for his professional discipline and had never missed a performance in his 4 Broadway engagements. He deserves support for this coming "rebuilt" production of Music Man ( without Rudin).

I was a fan of the film version of The Music Man with Robert Preston but had never seen a live version. Just like the reason why I came to see Oklahoma! in London ( saw the movie - not very impressed then - but I am a great fan of Rodgers&Hammerstein and wanted to see a live performance of a show that was considered a landmark musical)...I have learned that The Music Man is a classic musical and was the very first TONY winner for Best Musical as well as being the GRAMMY winner for the Original Broadway Cast Recording. I am looking forward to seeing it now. I also did not know stuff like Paul McCartney owning the music rights to TheMusicMan - one of his big hits as a Beatle was "'Til There Was You" which he recorded without knowing then that it came from a musical. I also have the book by Meredith Willson. Edit : I did not know how strong its critical reception was as a movie until I checked its Rotten Tomato rating : 94% rating from critics!

I do not live in America...but a return trip to NYC ( where I had once worked) is always a welcome chance. I am seeing not just Music Man but since I missed To Kill A Mockingbird in my last trip, I am planning to see that - the film with Grergory Peck was another one I liked a lot.

I always believe in fairness ( and I can honestly say that it was my governing principle when I used to work as part of the management team in a large financial institution) - not because someone else is fair or not fair. We all have to make decisions, small and large, in our lives that reflect on our own personal philosophies, so whichever decision one wants to make re the Music Man revival should reflect his own personal beliefs. I also belong to a different culture.

Assuming travel restrictions will be relaxed by the time my chance to see The Music Man happens, I even look forward to introducing the show to a young relative ( budding musical theatre fan) who saw Les Miserables when she was only 11 and cried all the way!

[jo]

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/COf1bNkhNmY

[jo]

I thought we were only among the few who worried what would happen to the show when the Rudin scandal broke out -
quite a few with baited breath!

[jo]

May 5, 2021 11:42:22 GMT -5 jo said:

[jo]

Hopefully, Hugh will extend beyond July 2022, at least for the summer time and even early fall. Originally, he was committed to the show for a year's run ( but that was when it was supposed to open in September 2020). Maybe he might stll extend to complete the year, unless there are filming commitments by then? However, a replacement Harold might have difficulties encouraging attendance at winter time 2023 and onwards?


Jo

[jo]

I find it a little surprising that quite a few men have actually tweeted about their desire to see the show.

Some interest could be because they are Wolverine fans and they want to see Hugh perform in person?


Jo

[njr]

^ Have you thought about the fact that a lot of non-straight men love musical theater? 😉 (they may or may not be Wolverine fans)

[jo]

[jo]

[njr]

^ Yeah, me too, if I looked like she does! 😂

[jo]

Decades ago, in London, I went to see Miss Saigon in its opening run...and I saw a group of people being ushered in with the ladies all wearing formal long dress. I guess there was a time when going to the theatre was considered a special event.

Maybe they still do, also on Broadway, for Opening Night?


Jo

[jo]

[jo]

The ultimate challenge for Hugh Jackman!

Der Müde ‘Tude
@dermudetude
The only trouble with #TheMusicMan is that it is quite impossible to find anyone who could ever be as good in the lead role as the late Robert Preston is. The man was one of a kind.

#TCMParty
5:03 AM · Jul 5, 2021·TweetDeck


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Semantic Romantic
@realronicooper
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2h
Replying to
@dermudetude
I agree. Always have. But I’ll be curious to see Hugh Jackman’s interpretation. And he IS a talent powerhouse.
#TCMParty
Der Müde ‘Tude
@dermudetude



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2h
He'll certainly be worth seeing. #TheMusicMan
#TCMParty
Show replies
Joel Williams
@joelrwilliams1
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2h
Replying to
@dermudetude
There’s only one Professor Harold Hill!
#TCMParty #TheMusicMan
Holly Forsman
@holly500


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55m
Replying to
@dermudetude
A big name actor was offered #themusicman film lead & told the producers "If #RobertPreston doesn't play him, I won't even go see see it."
dave reynard
@driller_dave
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2h
Replying to
@dermudetude
Just wonder how he prepared and was able to maintain it through the film.
Marie just Marie Watermelon Lethargy Enthusiast Blossom
@d3sk
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2h
Replying to
@dermudetude
So true.

What do you think?


My own impressions --

*Hugh Jackman has been in a few movies where he has successfully portrayed a con man, but in a different light.

The Greatest Showman is the most impressive example of this kind of portrayal. Someone whose personal ambitions are belied by actions to get people to believe that they can do anything (in aid of his personal ambitions to develop mass entertainment)
.
Even the people he betrayed finally forgave and gave him a second chance!

To this day, the popularity of the movie and its score endures! A "global gangbuster" - as someone recently described it!

There's even a certain of similarity in their names -- The Music Man vs The Greatest Showman!

Can you imagine successfully fusing the characters of both in one performer!



More recently, Hugh portrayed another charismatic con man -- the influential educator Frank Tassone who led a community to its glory...but within him lurking nefarious motives. But he was loved!



*Hugh is a very fine actor...and his talent and versatility has been acknowledged by so many now -- especially after the more recent triumvirate of LOGAN / THE GREATEST SHOWMAN / BAD EDUCATION.


*Hugh is very well known for his ability to handle both film and the live stage! His natural venue has always been the stage, a performing art for which he has been fully trained...and has enthralled audiences.

The theatre has also been in love with Hugh Jackman...or at least, many of its audiences. They are willing to be fooled by his impersonations - be it an entertainer who once led a double life ( married an icon...and then eventually became openly LBTQ), a cop who played rogue, and even way back, a cowboy who used charm (and even tried to fool "Poor Jud") in the town but could not initially persuade doubting Laurey.


*In a slightly different milieu and with different kind of audiences -- he charmed so many from is recent music tour! He went on a tour involving 90 shows - showing his triple-threat talent...and engaging the audience in a manner not known for performers. Everyone fell in love with him!


*One distinctive trait of Hugh Jackman as a performer is his obvious "joy of performing"! Hard to describe how he does it -- but one is easily taken not only by his seeming total devotion to the role but his ability to show the audience that he is there to please them! Very rare ability given a few performers on a live stage (the theatre or on a concert stage).


*Hugh Jackman has the looks and the gift of charisma! Enough said!



Slightly overenthusiastic Jo  ()