It takes two to be Hugh

The most adored performer on Broadway at the moment is, without question, Hugh Jackman -- both of him.

"Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway" has created this season's most virulent case of box-office fever by presenting the snazziest single-double act New York has known since Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner played Siamese twins in "Side Show" 14 years ago.

Technically, there's only one Hugh Jackman. He's that strapping, muscle-flexing actor who plays the manly mutant Wolverine in the lucrative "X-Men" movie franchise. But wait a minute. Isn't he the swivel-hipped song-and-dance man who won a Tony Award in 2004, playing the epicene entertainer Peter Allen in "The Boy From Oz"?

The point of Jackman's show -- which ends its limited, sold-out run Jan. 1 and is the hardest ticket in New York to come by -- is that he contains, if not multitudes, then a teeming crowd of two. Eight times a week he clefts himself in twain for the delectation of largely female audiences who love him just for his selves.

Let's face it. Jackman is, unapologetically and triumphantly, the bi-est guy in town: bicultural, bimorphic, binational, biprofessional and, for entertainment purposes, bisexual.

Jackman makes a point of reminding the audience throughout his fleet-footed show, which combines musical numbers with an "All About Hugh" narrative, that he's a long and happily married man. But despite -- or perhaps because of -- his firmly affirmed marital status, Jackman often gleefully comports himself onstage in the manner of what, in less enlightened times, might have been called a flaming queen.

First of all, the guy makes no bones about saying that he loves musicals. Male musical-comedy love is one of those red flags that naive young women are told to watch out for when they're searching for a mate. Jackman, though, would like to make it clear that a fellow can wallow in a splashy, dance-crammed Vincente Minnelli film such as "The Band Wagon" and still be a sweaty ace on the playing field. (That's one of the lessons of the television series "Glee" too, but Jackman claimed the territory first.)

This dichotomy shapes both the form and content of "Back on Broadway," which is directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, lending it a wholesome, all-embracing eroticism that would seem to be more appealing to women than to men. The show unfolds as a point-counterpoint presentation of, if you will, the yin and yang of Hugh.

His opening number, Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," is from "Oklahoma!" the most classic of classic musicals, in which Jackman starred for the National Theater in London in 1998. He played Curly the cowman, a reminder of when musical-comedy heroes were virile guys' guys and shy showoffs with women. The first act of "Back on Broadway" ends with Jackman embodying another, similar Rodgers & Hammerstein figure, singing the "Soliloquy" of Billy Bigelow, the burly carnival barker from "Carousel."

In between, though, Jackman slips out of the clenched-fist, working-clothes persona of the Rodgers & Hammerstein man and into something more shimmery. He confesses -- and succumbs -- to urges to swing his hips and tap his toes. A medley centered on the song "I Won't Dance" becomes an anatomical, Jekyll-and-Hyde study of a man being seduced by Broadway rhythms, erupting into show-boy choreography despite himself.

Jackman explains that this sort of dancing gives him a lithe, lean body that is markedly different from that of the bulked-up Wolverine he plays in the "X-Men" films, and he shows movie footage to illustrate the difference. The producers of "X-Men," Jackman says, worry about this transformation from mesomorph to ectomorph. But watching "Back on Broadway," you feel that if he chose, he could regrow those missing muscles on the spot. He doesn't, of course. Instead, his body becomes even more serpentine for the top of the second act, and the show's high point.