Hugh Jackman might be a blockbuster movie star, but he’s also one of the major Broadway stars of the last decade. His past two returns to Broadway — first in the play A Steady Rain and second in a solo musical revue Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway — sold out 101% and 99% of all available seats, respectively. That doesn’t even account his first Broadway success, which was the lead role in The Boy From Oz, for which he won the 2004 Tony and Drama Desk awards. Heck, he was even given a special Tony Award in 2012 pretty much for just being Hugh Jackman. The Great White Way loves this man.
So even though Jackman has enjoyed box office success with movies like The Wolverine and Prisoners, The Wall Street Journal asks him the real question on everyone’s mind in New York: when is he coming back to Broadway?
Well, Jackman is developing a musical about the life of Houdini with composer Stephen Schwartz, though there’s no date set for when (or if) it will make to Broadway. He explains, “I love going on Broadway. This is very exciting to me, because I’ve never done a new musical before. Everything I’ve done, from Oklahoma or The Boy From Oz, Beauty and the Beast, Sunset Boulevard, someone else had developed.”
Jackman is still floored by the fact that Schwartz, who wrote Broadway hits Godspell, Pippin, and Wicked, is writing the musical for him. He reveals, “You know what is unbelievable? He came to see my show once or twice. In my one-man show, I sing maybe 20 songs. He’s like, I got this guy’s voice, and he wrote these songs. It was astonishing to me. It’s, I would say, the greatest luxury ever known. People say having a hand-fitted suit or a handmade pair of shoes is great. Trust me, when someone like Stephen Schwartz writes a song for you, that is luxury.”
