Hugh Jackman’s first world tour will be coming to Australia in August, with special guest appearances from actor and singer Keala Settle, who played the bearded woman in 2017’s Jackman-starring The Greatest Showman.
The Australian actor will be accompanied by an orchestra and special guests during the global arena tour, in which he will perform songs from The Greatest Showman, Les Miserables and other moments from his Broadway career – which included a Tony award-winning stint in the lead role of The Boy from Oz.
The tour – titled The Man, The Music, The Show – opens in Glasgow in May before moving through Europe and North America. It will run in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane through August.
Jackman’s biggest Hollywood roles include playing Wolverine in the X-Men franchise, as well as his Oscar-nominated performance as Jean Valjean in the 2012 film version of Les Miserables. The Greatest Showman, which starred Jackman as PT Barnum, was a box office sensation despite being critically panned.
The Grammy-winning soundtrack went on to become the highest selling album of 2018, and the film’s director, Michael Gracey, told the Sun last week that they were working on a follow-up film. “When a movie becomes as big a success as this, it’s only natural there is demand for a sequel,” Gracey said. “So those discussions have started and we are working on one right now.”
Jackman announced the Australian dates at a press conference in Sydney on Tuesday, where he performed A Million Dreams, a song from the Greatest Showman, with 50 singers from the Australian Girls Choir. Settle sang the Golden Globe-winning song This Is Me, before Jackman, Settle and host Andy Lee surprised the gathered journalists by performing an “elegant, swellegant” (and fairly hammy) all-singing Q&A.
Settle will be joining Jackman for each show on the Australian tour. Jackman told the audience about the day she was cast in The Greatest Showman. Given only two days to learn This Is Me, he said, she moved the music stand aside during the final auditions, and sang it with her back turned to the studio executives.
“She sang the song. Killed it. Tears coming down her face. Everyone, every single studio executive, all crying,” Jackman said. “The head of the studio leaps up out of his chair, runs across the stage, hugs her and says, ‘You just booked your first major motion picture’.”
Jackman, 50, performed the opening number at last week’s Brit awards; he said his live show requires “a lot of preparation”.
“This show has got a lot of dancing in it, and my choreographer likes to think I’m 25 years of age and so yeah, my knees are bending in ways they haven’t in a while.”
Jackman toured a similar stage show in Australia in 2015, but promised “a bunch of stories that nobody’s heard before” this time, and said he would be “singing some different stuff from last time”.
Asked whether he would be singing any songs in character as Wolverine, he shook his head. “No. I’ve tried. And I will keep trying to somehow get a Wolverine kickline into the repertoire … it just doesn’t seem to work.”
Tickets for the Australian shows will be on sale on Thursday 7 March.
