“Hugh Jackman LIVE” and “Beckett Briefs” Make a Spectacle of Time’s Passage

In “Hugh Jackman LIVE, from New York with Love,” the Oscar-nominated, multiple Tony Award-winning Marvel mega-super-über-ultrastar can’t seem to get over the fact that he has his own show at Radio City Music Hall. “Look at us, Gussy!” he called to a childhood friend in the audience the night I saw it. “Who would have thought it?” At some point, as Jackman performs twenty-four shows there in the next ten months, his surprise may fade. Yet this is a key aspect of Jackman’s charisma: a kind of sweet humility that constantly refreshes itself. Though the actor has starred in five Broadway productions, shredded box-office records as the X-Men’s vein-popping Wolverine, performed a whole other autobiographical retrospective (“Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway,” in 2011), and even hosted four Tony ceremonies at Radio City, his happy-to-be-here, gee-willikers excitement somehow remains intact. “I’ll never forget this,” he told a Saturday crowd, a little catch in his voice.

Jackman, his beard now striped a distinguished gray, wears a slim three-piece suit, tie-less, as if he’s still playing a huckster in “The Music Man,” or maybe a faith healer with great microphone skills. In the course of an energetic hour and forty-five minutes, he, his orchestra, four backup singers, and four dancers offer a tour of his Hollywood and Broadway career. The set list includes several of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s sugary anthems from “The Greatest Showman”; a good chunk of the dazzling Australian entertainer Peter Allen’s œuvre, which Jackman interpreted in “The Boy from Oz,” earning a Tony; and, during a sequence in which his twanging timbre sounds most at home, a few Neil Diamond hits. (He’s recently finished shooting a role as a real-life Diamond impersonator, in a film called “Song Sung Blue.”)

The dramatic peak, perhaps predictably, is Jackman’s tearful rendition of “Soliloquy,” from “Les Misérables,” introduced with an excerpt from Tom Hooper’s 2012 film, in which the actor played the rehabilitated thief Jean Valjean. “Here where I stand at the turning of the years!” he cries out, and we can compare his grim intensity with his younger self’s glowering righteousness on the screen behind him. In the course of the show I attended, he also professed his love and thanks to every single person in the room, including Cameron Mackintosh, that film’s producer, who was somewhere in the good seats; an usher Jackman sat on during an ecstatic bit of improv; various collaborators; and, again and again, the Wolverine fans and “Showman”-heads shouting out to him from the audience.

The illusion of intimacy on view should have been hard to create, because Radio City is a barn. (At its tallest point, the theatre is eight stories high.) To bring us close to the action, huge screens hanging on either side of the stage broadcast the live feed of cameras that track Jackman wherever he goes, whether it’s into the aisles, for a laying on of high-fives, or downstage center, for a closeup. We’re therefore very close—as in Tom Hooper shooting “Soliloquy” close—to any flicker of vulnerability. Vocally, too, Jackman makes a kind of spectacle of his modesty. He cheerfully allows his singing voice to be outstripped by the gorgeous vocalists around him. (The night I went, the backup singer Lauren Blackman had to step in, after a guest performer fell ill, to sing the Pasek-and-Paul song “Never Enough”; her staggering performance received the only mid-show standing ovation of the night.) I do wonder if Jackman keeps his ego in check by placing himself among virtuosos whose artistry he—with his lovely baritone urged toward an effortful tenor—can never quite reach. Other superhero actors might retreat behind a shellacked persona when they’re not punching walls. But Jackman doubles down on his musical-theatre ambitions, and his sense of awe. He’s a luvvie in the skin of a lion.

And, if we’ve missed a moment of vulnerability, he makes sure to point it out. For instance, right before he performs an Alexi Murdoch ballad, “All My Days,” from the soundtrack of his robot-boxing movie, “Real Steel,” he tells the audience that the song was used in the film to underscore a wordless scene, during which his character, an unemployed prizefighter, sits in the cab of a truck, alone. On the day of filming, Jackman had just received bad news about his father’s health; as we watch the clip, he deliberately attunes us to the real grief shading his performance.

Over and over, between the jokes and the frolics, Jackman demonstrates his unguardedness and ready affection, hugging the occasional person returning from the bathroom, or welling up on camera, with sorrow, or overwhelmed gratitude, or both. “Hugh Jackman LIVE, from New York with Love,” despite the goofy double-barrelled title, is therefore as much ministry as show biz. Gussy, Jackman’s best friend in the audience, turns out to be Gus Worland, a mental-health advocate, and Jackman speaks earnestly about Worland’s work in suicide prevention and hidden pain. It’s Jackman’s theme for the night. “Never worry alone,” he says.

I do not believe that Samuel Beckett was thinking of a career-retrospective song-and-dance show when he wrote “Krapp’s Last Tape,” in which a grizzled curmudgeon listens to the reel-to-reel diary recordings he made in his younger, more optimistic days, but Beckett’s exquisite monodrama, from 1958, does oddly rhyme with Jackman’s flashier evening. As part of a precisely judged anthology called “Beckett Briefs,” directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, “Krapp,” too, traffics in celebrity and proximity, though at that tiny venue you can’t really help but feel close to the star, F. Murray Abraham. (Given the size of the house, you can’t get much distance from him unless you hide in the lobby.)

Abraham, who won an Oscar as Antonio Salieri in “Amadeus,” from 1984, is a master craftsman of sonorous self-loathing. Here he plays the ragged Krapp, celebrating what might be his last birthday, swigging booze at intervals that he carefully times with a pocket watch. Krapp begins by recording his annual diary entry, but he’s distracted, preferring instead to root through boxes to find the spools of his youth and middle age. (“Spooooool!” he says, happy with the word in his mouth.) We hear about the hard rubber ball he threw for a dog as his mother lay dying in her cottage, and a rowboat drifting through marshy reeds as he and a woman bade each other farewell. His awareness seems focussed then and now on physical sensations at times of great—but diverted—emotion.

The other two Beckett microplays are “Not I,” performed by a hovering, spotlit mouth (Sarah Street), which seems to be disassociating at the moment of what might be death. “What? . . . who? . . . no! . . . she! ” the lipsticked mouth snaps, whenever its gabble about a suffering woman seems to turn personal. In the equally quick “Play,” Kate Forbes, Roger Dominic Casey, and Street play the members of a tortured love triangle that has continued into the world after this one: three heads perch on top of what look like huge canopic jars, each of them telling its side of a series of nasty betrayals. Purgatorial and punishing, the works are two of Beckett’s “aftermath” dramas, which use their brevity to hint at the long, existential suffering ahead.

Both of these hallucinatory miniatures, crucially, are about unlistening: the mouth in “Not I” denies its own body; the jarred trio are tied together forever (the script contains the instruction “repeat play”) but never hear one another. “Krapp,” though, is nearly all listening. Abraham, as his recorded voice speaks, adds to this sense of attention by embracing the tape machine itself, a big object on his desk which is the size of a suitcase. We can feel his grip tighten on its cold metal corners, just as Krapp can still feel the woman’s thigh beneath his hand. Krapp’s old self is a torture to him, full of misplaced bluster and the willingness to throw irreplaceable things away. Looking—or, rather, listening—back, he bows down to the sound of the younger fool, as though he’s presenting himself for judgment. Here, in Abraham’s paralyzed anguish, we feel the universal chill of retrospective thought. Even in Hugh Jackman’s charmed, successful, box-office-busting life, we find the same urge to return to the past, to the younger image, and, perhaps, to the sterner judge. ♦