Hugh Jackman brings jokes, drama and John Denver to opening night at the Hollywood Bowl
Strumming a black acoustic guitar to match his black tuxedo pants and jacket, Hugh Jackman strolled onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl and let the audience know precisely what it was in for.
'Little bit of Neil Diamond,' he said as the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra revved up the go-go self-improvement jive of 'Crunchy Granola Suite.'
A dedicated student of showbiz history, the Australian singer and actor was starting his concert Saturday night just as Diamond did half a century ago at the Greek Theatre gig famously captured on his classic 'Hot August Night' LP.
Yet Diamond was just one of the flamboyant showmen Jackman aspired to emulate as he headlined the opening night of the Bowl's 2025 season. Later in the concert, the 56-year-old sang a medley of tunes by Peter Allen, the Australian songwriter and Manhattan bon vivant whom Jackman portrayed on Broadway in 2003 in 'The Boy From Oz.' And then there was P.T. Barnum, whose career as a maker of spectacle inspired the 2017 blockbuster 'The Greatest Showman,' which starred Jackman as Barnum and spawned a surprise-hit soundtrack that went quadruple-platinum.
'There's 17,000 of you, and if any of you did not see 'The Greatest Showman,' you might be thinking right now: This guy is super-confident,' Jackman told the crowd, panting ever so slightly after he sang the movie's title song, which has more than 625 million streams on Spotify.
The success of 'Showman' notwithstanding, Jackman's brand of stage-and-screen razzle-dazzle feels fairly rare in pop music these days among male performers. (The theater-kid moment that helped make 'Wicked' a phenomenon was almost exclusively engineered — and has almost exclusively benefited — women such as Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Chappell Roan and Laufey.) What makes Jackman's jazz-handing even more remarkable is that to many he's best known as the extravagantly mutton-chopped Wolverine character from the Marvel movies.
Before Jackman's performance on Saturday, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins, played a brief set of orchestral music that included selections from John Ottman's score for 'X2: X-Men United.'
The ascent of Benson Boone, with his mustache and his backflips, suggests that Jackman may yet find inheritors to carry on the tradition he himself was bequeathed by Diamond and the rest. But of course that assumes that Jackman is looking to pass the baton, which was not at all the impression you got from his spirited and athletic 90-minute show at the Bowl.
In addition to stuff from 'The Greatest Showman' and a swinging tribute to Frank Sinatra, he did a second Diamond tune — 'Sweet Caroline,' naturally, which he said figures into an upcoming movie in which he plays a Diamond impersonator — and a couple of Jean Valjean's numbers from 'Les Misérables,' which Jackman sang in the 2012 movie adaptation that earned him an Academy Award nomination for lead actor. (With an Emmy, a Grammy and two Tonys to his name, he's an Oscar win away from EGOT status.)
For 'You Will Be Found,' from 'Dear Evan Hansen,' he sat down behind a grand piano and accompanied himself for a bit; for the motor-mouthed 'Ya Got Trouble,' from 'The Music Man' — the first show he ever did as a high school kid, he pointed out — he came out into the crowd, weaving among the Bowl's boxes and interacting with audience members as he sang.
'I just saw a lot of friends as I went through,' he said when he returned to the stage. 'Hello, Melissa Etheridge and Linda. Hello, Jess Platt. Hi, Steph, hi, David, hi, Sophia, hi, Orlando — so many friends. Very difficult to say hello to friends and still do that dialogue.' He was panting again, this time more showily. 'It's like 53 degrees and I'm sweating.'
The show's comedic centerpiece was a version of John Denver's 'Thank God I'm a Country Boy' that Jackman remade to celebrate his roots as an 'Aussie boy.' There were good-natured jokes about shark attacks and koalas and Margot Robbie, as well as a few pointed political gibes, one about how 'our leaders aren't 100 years old' — 'I'm moving on from that joke fast,' he added — and another that rhymed 'Life down under is really quite fun' with 'I never have to worry: Does that guy have a gun?'
The emotional centerpiece, meanwhile, was 'Showman's' 'A Million Dreams,' for which the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra was joined by 18 members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Youth Orchestra Los Angeles. The song itself is pretty cringe, with a lyric bogged down by cliches and a melody you've heard a zillion times before. But Jackman sold its corny idealism with a huckster's sincerity you couldn't help but buy.
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