After spending the night in either dashing formalwear or glitzy Vegas garb, Hugh Jackman donned just a black T-shirt and jeans for "Mack the Knife" late on Saturday night at Xcel Energy Center.
As he went into the song's big finish, he revved up his right arm in a windmill like Elvis, leapt triumphantly into the air and flashed that million-dollar movie-star smile, half in cockiness, half in jubilation. Then he pulled down his T-shirt like a dad, gazed into the cheering throng and stopped in his tracks.
"This is my favorite sight of the night," Jackman announced. A young girl in the front row — whom he'd singled out earlier in the evening — was dressed just like a pink-haired character in Jackman's hit 2017 movie "The Greatest Showman." Now she was asleep in her mother's arms.
It was Hugh Jackman in a nutshell. Sentimental, sweet and spontaneous.
We've long known that he's handsome and hunky and a dazzling song-and-dance man. But he's really funny, too. All those traits made Jackman's "The Man. The Music. The Show" one of the more uncompromisingly ambitious, flashily entertaining and consistently uplifting tours undertaken by a performer you never expected to see in a sports arena.
He's a big-time movie star. And a Tony-winning musical theater veteran. And fans of all stripes packed the X — people in Wolverine T-shirts (thank you, "X-Men"), youngsters in top hats (see "The Greatest Showman"), people in rainbow colors (see "The Boy from Oz") and just folks in their Saturday-night outfits.
Jackman played the Pride Weekend card, pointing out that he'd just learned (from the local One Voice Mixed Chorus, which backed him on a few tunes), about the expanded acronym GLBTQIA. "A" stood for "ally," and he proclaimed that he was a proud ally. He wasn't pandering; he was merely underscoring a theme of his show, which told the story of his life. Be who you are.
The 50-year-old revisited different chapters, like when his older brother called 9-year-old Hugh a sissy for wanting to take dance lessons. Or when his wife gave him a pep talk about how to portray Wolverine when complaining studio bosses were about to fire him.
