Toring a black acoustic guitar to match his black tuxedo pants and jacket, Hugh Jackman walked to the Hollywood Bowl stage and let him know precisely what he was.
“A little Neil Diamond,” he said while Hollywood Bowl accelerated the personal overcoming of the “crispy granola suite.”
A dedicated student from the history of the show, the Australian singer and actor was starting his concert on Saturday night, as Diamond did half a century ago at the Greek theater concert, captured in his classic LP “Hot August Night”.
However, Diamond was only one of the extravagant Showmen Jackman aspired to emulate while heading the opening night of the 2025 season of the bowl. Later in the concert, the 56 -year -old sang a mixture of songs by Peter Allen, the Australian composer and Manhattan Bon Vivant, whom Jackman portrayed in Broadway in 2003 in “The Boy from Oz”. And then there was PT Barnum, whose stroke as a spectacle manufacturer inspired the box office success “The Greatest Showman” of 2017, starred Jackman as Barnum and generated a surprising soundtrack that was quadratino.
“There are 17,000 of you, and if any of you did not see 'the best showman', I could be thinking at this time: this guy is super-Confident, ”Jackman told the crowd, panting very slightly after singing the movie title song, which has more than 625 million transmissions in Spotify.
Despite the success of “Showman”, Razzle's glare mark of Jackman feels quite weird in pop music these days among male artists. (The moment of the theater that helped make “Wicked” a phenomenon was designed almost exclusively, and has almost exclusively benefited, women like Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Chappell Roan and Laufey). What makes Jackman even more notable is that, for many, he is the best known as Marvel's character in Marvel.
Before Jackman's performance on Saturday, the Hollywood Bowl orchestra, directed by Thomas Wilkins, played a brief set of orchestral music that included selections from John Ottman's score for “X2: X-Men United.”
The rise of Benson Boone, with his mustache and his backflips, suggests that Jackman can still find heirs to continue with the tradition that he himself was legacy by Diamond and the rest. But, of course, that means that Jackman is looking to pass the cane, which was not at all the impression you obtained from his spirit and athletic of 90 minutes in the bowl.
In addition to the things of “The Greatest Showman” and an oscillating tribute to Frank Sinatra, he made a second melody of diamonds: “Sweet Caroline”, naturally, which said they appear in an upcoming film in which he plays a diamond imitator, and a couple of Jean Valjean numbers of “Les Misérables”, that Jackman sang in the adaptation of the film to the Academy of Academy. (With an Emmy, a Grammy and two Tonys in his name, it is a victory of Oscar away from the state of Egot).
Hugh Jackman with members of the Phil Los Angeles Youth Orchestra on Saturday night.
(Timothy Norris)
Because “you will be found”, from “Dear Evan Hansen”, he sat behind a tail piano and accompanied a little; For the “already Got Trouble”, by “The Music Man”, the first show he made as a secondary school boy, he said, went out to the crowd, weaving between the boxes of the bowl and interacting with the members of the audience while sanging.
“I just saw many friends while passing,” he said when he returned to the stage. “Hello, Melissa Etheridge and Linda. Hello, Jess Platt. Hi, Steph, Hi, David, Hi Sophia, Hi, Orlando, many friends. Very difficult to greet friends and continue doing that dialogue.” I was panting again, this time with more vision. “It's like 53 degrees and I'm sweating.”
The program comedy was a version of “Thank Gank i'm to Country Boy” by John Denver that Jackman remade to celebrate his roots as an “Australian child.” There were good character jokes about shark and Koalas and Margot Robbie attacks, as well as some pointed political gibas, one envelope how “our leaders are not 100 years old.” “I move from that joke quickly,” he added, and another that rhymes “life is really fun” with “I never have to worry: does that guy have a gun”?
Meanwhile, the emotional centerpiece was “Showman” “to Million Dreams”, for which the Hollywood Bowl orchestra joined 18 members of the youth orchestra of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Los Angeles. The song itself is quite narrow, with a letter bogged by clichés and a melody that you have heard one billion times before. But Jackman sold his cheesy idealism with the sincerity of a Huckster that you could not avoid buying.
