Hugh Jackman. Just the name is enough to make movie and theater fans swoon. Not just Wolverine, not just Tony Awards host, not just Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper's Les Misérables film, Jackman is a triple-threat song-and-dance man. Now, like last year's Tony host Neil Patrick Harris, the 2014 emcee is returning to the Broadway stage in his own vehicle.
Starring Jackman and directed by Ian Rickson, Jez Butterworth's The River is set to open October 31 at the Circle in the Square Theatre for a limited run through January 25. The Guardian called the play "strange, eerie, tense and, on a single viewing, slightly unfathomable" upon its 2012 run at London's Royal Court Theatre.
This will be the Oscar nominee's fourth Broadway role. Jackman won Tony and Drama Desk awards as singer/songwriter Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz, and also appeared in A Steady Rain and the self-explanatory Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway.
Laura Donnelly, who appeared in the London production, will return for The River's Broadway premiere, which will also feature Olivier Award nominee Cush Jumbo. Like Jackman, Donnelly is well known from movies and TV (Dread, Merlin, Missing).
Though Hugh Jackman has a larger-than-life stage personality, some of his best-known roles have been isolated drifters. It seems appropriate that his return to Broadway will be in the role of a trout fisherman who lives in a remote cliffside cabin and is known only as The Man, opposite characters called The Woman and The Other Woman.
Those awaiting his return to the "X-Men" film franchise won't have to wait until October. X-Men: Days of Future Past comes out May 23, with Jackman reprising his role as Logan/Wolverine. But for best swooning, fans will want to get in the same room with the actor, and that room will be Broadway's Circle in the Square Theatre.
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