What you've heard is true: Hugh Jackman is indefatigably entertaining in The Boy From Oz. His voice has the heat of molten steel pouring from a Bessemer vat. He's got a chiseled face and figure to send women (and certain men) into Victorian swoons. He moves with the kind of grace common to the white tigers now temporarily laid off from the Siegfried and Roy show. He has a smile that warms an entire auditorium. In short, he stands a good chance of keeping this much-discussed production afloat as long as he remains in it.

But he isn't -- as someone reported to me -- the best thing to hit the Great White Way since Barbra Streisand surfaced in 1962. And he's not persuasive as singer/songwri[...]