We're in a part of downtown Los Angeles where tourists fear to tread. At mid morning the heat is already brutal. A woman outside the fence grapples with a man, trying to kick him where it hurts. You son of a bitch, she yells. "What's wrong with you?" he yells back. "It's too hot!"

Then a Range Rover pulls up. Hugh Jackman steps out, smiling, taller by a head than anyone on the crew for his Advocate photo shoot. Lithe and lanky rather than belligerently bulked-up like Wolverine, his grunge-a-licious character in X-Men, Jackman seems to breathe a more gracious blend of air than the rest of us.

He's here to talk about his new role as Peter Allen, the all-but-openly gay hit songwriter and master performer who was born in Australia and discovered by Judy Garland and who married Liza Minnelli, packed Radio City Music Hall, and wrote or cowrote some dozen massive hit songs before his death from AIDS complications in 1992. Allen is a hero in Australia. Portraying him in The Boy From Oz, the 1997 Allen musical biography now being restaged on Broadway, Jackman will high-kick, play piano, kiss Jerrod Emick (who portrays Allen's longtime love, lighting designer Greg Connell), and, hopefully, give Allen the all-out star recognition he never quite had time to earn here in the States.

Americans are also just getting acquainted with Jackman. He made a stir as a dashing time traveler in Kate & Leopold. But it's Wolverine, the Marvel mutant with the adamantium skeleton, fierce claws, and mutton-chop do, who really got us. Jackman was a plan B replacement for Dougray Scott, who had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts. In return for the gig, Jackman invested the part with all his very considerable heart, not to mention a handsome chest of Wolverine-ish hair. His soulful reading has helped turn the X-Men films into global box-office smashes.

"He has no idea how good-looking he is," the makeup artist whispers in my ear as Jackman walks in our direction. Is this possible?

Did you ever meet Peter Allen?

I never did. When did he die? '92. He probably was out of action from about '90. I knew of Peter and I watched him--he was still doing stuff on TV, and he was a big icon. I remember very clearly once when he sang "I Still Call Australia Home," which is now like a second anthem in Australia. The first time he sang it was at the launch of a 15,000-seat entertainment center. Peter had on this quite camp waistcoat with an Australian flag on it, and out came this big Australian flag behind him.

My father was [watching with] my brother and I. We looked up, and Dad was crying. Peter had that way with everyone--old, young, men, women, gay, straight--which in Australia was not that easy, you know?

Craig Zadan directed Peter in Up in One, a 1979 cabaret show that toured the world and broke Peter into the top ranks of entertainers. He says Peter would make you laugh yourself sick, and then in 30 seconds you'd be crying and not know how you got there.

One of the great things about The Boy From Oz is, I think you get that feeling of being with Peter. It's incredibly entertaining and very fanny but very surprisingly gets you. Peter was not a sentimental person--in public he wasn't--but he had an honesty in his songwriting that just touches you. He had a way of capturing something incredibly simple and honest. I can think of 10 of Peter's songs that just slay me. Just absolutely slay me.

Not many people realize how much his songs defined the '70s and '80s.

In this show you get to see what those songs actually meant. A song like "I Honestly Love You" became a big hit for Olivia [Newton-John], and it maybe now seems a bit of a cheesy love song. But in the context of Peter's life, when you think he lost his lover of 20 years, Greg, to AIDS--you hear that song in the show, and it's the ghost of his lover still being around him as he's writing.

[Sings] "Maybe I hang around here a little more than I should / We both know I've got somewhere else to go / But I've got something to tell you / I never thought I would / That I believe you really ought to know / I love you." It's so simple, but in the context of the show it's incredible.

Carole Bayer Sager, a close friend of Peter's with whom he wrote some huge hits, says you've really got him down.

I had dinner the other night with Carole. She's fascinating, fantastic. It's funny--she said to me, "You get that tongue thing of his." [Chuckles]

What tongue thing would that be?

He would unconsciously stick his tongue out when he was playing. And apparently I was doing that. I was like, "Well, there you go!" Maybe I was channeling him at some point.

Carole told me, the last time she spoke to Peter, he said, "You know what, Carole? I'm happy. I couldn't have lived life any more than I have."

Was Peter more a songwriter or a performer?

Another guy told how he'd have Peter up for dinner whenever he wan in New York. "Peter would charm everybody, and then--I'd never ask him--he'd get up on the piano and just start playing. In the end I would literally be kicking him out the door. Guests would be leaving and he'd still be playing." [Stockwell laughs] He said to Peter that night, "I know you love it. But you don't have to feel you always have to play." And Peter said to him, "I'm an entertainer--always got to sing for my supper."

Peter was aware that what he was born to do was to entertain. Maybe being a star is more about letting people come to you, you know? But Peter was old-fashioned.

Is that you too? Singing for your supper?

Probably a little more reluctantly than Peter, because he was someone that all entertainers look up to. Anyone who really knew Peter--many great names--they all looked up to him as a showman. I'm thrilled that I didn't do this show, say, four years ago, five years ago. With everything that's occurred to me in movies, in Hollywood, I felt I was being dragged by a Great Dane down the street. It's sort of like, Whoa, I'll catch up in a second. Now I feel like I've caught up--I feel a little more comfortable in my skin. It takes a great confidence to just, wherever you are, think, People want to hear me. People want that. I suppose with me it's something that's growing. Doing the Boy From Oz workshop [in early 2003] gave me a confidence to do it. It feels like the right time to go and do a show like this and say, "Yeah, I can be Peter."

I've heard that everybody fell in love with him. [Jackman laughs] Man, woman, everybody.

He was a kid who grew up in an outback town, Tenterfield. Now, I've been to Tenterfield: It's a small town that services farmers, and men are tough there. Peter tap-dancing at the age of 8 in a local pub--what did he have to endure in his upbringing? But he managed to make them like him. Even now, in that town of Tenterfield, there's a Peter Allen pub and a store.

When Peter was at Radio City, he was playing with the closet, saying things onstage like, "You've heard all these rumors about me. Well, yes, I am ... Australian."

"Australian." Yeah. [Chuckles] Missing link: Jackman is equally at home playing X-Man Wolverine (far left) and gay entertainer Peter Allen (above).

Here he was, this national hero. How did people in Australia deal with that part of him, the gay part?

They didn't care. In fact, I think a lot of people--until relatively late--didn't know. Women found him sexy and thought it was just part of his shtick. Or maybe he was just one of those flamboyant guys. I mean, he wasn't over-the-top, it wasn't so Liberace.

So how do you play him?

The director said to me, the key to playing Peter is that you can't think of him as a gay man, because as a straight man it will send you off in the wrong direction. You have to think of him as a little kid. He was mischievous, and from all the reports, his sexual appetite was voracious. So he was up for it all. But certainly by the end everyone knew of him as gay. See, Peter learned how to tread the line of making fun of himself enough and still being biting enough with reporters that everyone kind of went, "Yeah, all right, we'll accept him." Which, particularly in his time, was not the case with most. It really wasn't. He made my dad, born-again Christian that he was, love Peter Allen and not care that he was gay. Do you know what I mean? Perhaps Peter knew, as an entertainer, that's what he had to do. He wasn't comfortable being politically active, but he probably single-handedly did a lot.

If he were here, I'm sure it'd be very gratifying to him that one of the world's handsomest straight men is playing him [Jackman chuckles] and that he's being celebrated on the cover of The Advocate.

Yeah, there you go, exactly. You know, it's funny what you say about me playing him, because some people said, "It's brave of you to play a gay man." And I think that's very dated. Don't you?

It's terribly dated, but some Americans are holding on to it for dear life. I'm sure you've noticed.