When Hugh Jackman returned to his signature role of the superhero Wolverine last year, it was half a flex and half a retreat. On one hand, Deadpool & Wolverine has since become Jackman’s biggest movie ever, with well over $1bn in global grosses, with audiences obviously relishing the revival of the character as much as Deadpool himself did. On the other, Jackman played this part for 17 years before hanging up his claws with the elegiac Logan; going back after that feels like an admission, on some level, that his movie-star career can’t function the same way without it. In turn, this makes Jackman’s stint of 2025 live shows – two dozen of them through October at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, as well as a summer headlining gig at BST Hyde Park in London – part victory lap through the song-and-dance material he clearly loves, and part reassertion of his standalone star quality.
As the latter, it’s admittedly convincing – could many major other movie stars sell out multiple nights at Radio City doing a bunch of Broadway and Broadway-adjacent songs? Though Hugh Jackman: From New York, With Love isn’t a literal one-man operation – it employs a small group of back-up singers and dancers and even, on the Saturday evening show, a solo performed by the stage veteran Lauren Blackman – it rests entirely on Jackman’s shoulders. He clearly takes the responsibility seriously while attempting to wear it lightly; early in Saturday night’s show, he quickly outlined the shape of the approximately 110-minute program (“no encore, no interval”) and playfully showed off a handy guide to the locations of the Radio City bathrooms, encouraging people to step out as needed, rather than waiting for the right strategic moment. In other words, the atmosphere was more pop-crooner concert than Broadway revue. The setlist will seemingly change, at least slightly, from show to show, drawing from a pool of musicals that includes The Music Man, Oklahoma!, Les Miserables, The Boy from Oz, and the film sensation The Greatest Showman.
