The Boy from Oz

It does.

And the, um, yeah, singing, singing for me now is a joy, and the, Peter Allen is so loved, and my audiences are so loyal to him, and over the last three decades have become loyal to me since The Boy From Oz.

And so, uh, uh, it's, I sing more than I dance.

I mean, I'm almost 62, so I'm not dancing like I was when I did The Boy From Oz back in 1998.

And so, but I still m- move around and still do, I just do less actual choreographed dancing these days.

But when I do my one-man shows, for me, the, the connection to the audience and the chat is just as important as the songs and, and the dancing, and that's in fact what Peter Allen was too.

He had a, a really great connection to the audience.

And so when I was studying him to do The Boy From Oz, that's really w- was my big takeaway from it, was he has a great connection to the audience.

I think you learn something from theater, too.

Uh, I remember seeing The Boy From Oz, uh, Tod-

Oh, yeah

...

Great entertainers on and off the Broadway stage.

In our next show, The Boy From Oz, you get a, I don't know, can you get a quadrifecta? You get Peter Allen, Judy Garland, Hugh Jackman, and Isabel Keating.

So you wrap all that up and you get a real beautiful salute to the great entertainers.

Quiet please, there's a lady on stage She may not

He then made it internationally in stage shows such as Oklahoma! So he properly rose to international fame when he starred as Wolverine in the X-Men film franchise.

He later won a Tony Award for his performance in The Boy From Oz.

He just fucking killed it.

[laughs]

I was like, "Oh, my.

The Boy From Oz.

Okay." [laughs]

And Red and Stimpy are in this too.

[laughs] Red and Stimpy and The Boy From Oz is a crazy-ass movie.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Today I'm joined by two incredible talents.

Frophy who you might know from The Ferryman and The Unchosen and Martin Sherman the award-winning playwright behind Ben and the Boy from Oz.

We dive into their collaboration on i'll be seeing you sherman's bold new play about the legendary liberace seen through the eyes of a young playwright who's wrestling with the truth denial and dazzling spectacle of it all we talk about the magic of theater the surprises in the script and what it means to celebrate such an unforgettable icon I started by asking Fraw about how they're stepping into the shoes of a young playwright grappling with how to tell someone else's story and I wanted to know how much of their own experience as a performer is trying to understand complex characters and all of that feeding into this role here's what frost said

yes well i mean you know every job that you do i guess you're having to figure out who that person is that you're playing and whatever investigative work you can do to sort of unpack who they are is um i try to do as much as i can i mean the the blessing with this job of course is that i'm sat next to the writer So I've got the Oracle next to me.

I want to ask you about your Broadway debut, which came really close afterward.

How did you book The Boy From Oz?

Well, first, it was Patrick Vaccariello who was conducting Cabaret.

Okay.

But first, let's raise the curtain on some show tunes from Australian Broadway stars.

Winning a Tony Award in 2004 for his role as Peter Allen in Boy From Oz, this is Hugh Jackman singing I Go To Rio.

When my baby smiles at me, I go to Rio.

Is there a Miami-Dade? When my baby smiles at me, I do the samba and the bumba.