Word: jackman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chicago Dramatists, he still needed a day job--editing for a medical website--to help support himself, his wife and their 8-year-old daughter. Yet now he's a Broadway hot ticket. True, he has a couple of big movie stars to thank--Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman, who were somehow persuaded to star in his play A Steady Rain. But they're only helping affirm a hard truth for New York City's sometimes insular theater community: the Chicagoans are taking over...
...play that attracted Craig and Jackman is a deceptively modest piece: a 90-minute two-hander in which the British and Australian actors play (flawlessly) a pair of Chicago cops who recount, in alternating monologues, a harrowing chain of events that tears their lifelong friendship apart. The material is familiar to streetwise fans of Hollywood crime films and TV cop shows--the prostitutes and lowlifes, shocking violence and moral compromises faced by cops who patrol the urban jungle. But Huff's vivid, intricately layered script--a mix of straight narration, interlaced commentary and re-created scenes--lifts it far above...
...Jackman has the flashier role: shirtsleeves rolled up, dark hair slicked back, he's a brash, bullying but well-meaning family man, who has become an expert at justifying the moral compromises demanded by the urban jungle where he works. Craig is the more sensitive of the pair, sporting a file-clerk mustache and drab gray suit, a reformed alcoholic caught between his loyalty and his scruples. They've got their American (if not quite Chicago) accents down pat, but they never preen, or call attention to the against-type casting. It's otherwise known as acting...
Huff's play has the advantage, of course, of Jackman and Craig. Yes, you can be cynical about the two movie hunks who are drawing lines of autograph seekers outside the theater every night - as well as the producers smart enough to turn an obscure 2006 play by a little-known Chicago playwright into a box-office bonanza. But once the actors step onstage, all that dissipates. This is one star vehicle that should provide a good ride for plenty of non-star actors to come...
Read about Hugh Jackman in the 2009 TIME 100 Finalists