Broadway Preview

Wolverine and James Bond on stage together, with no one else, for an hour and a half—speaking in Chicago accents. This is the formula for A Steady Rain, starring Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig as gruff cops working the crime beat in Chicago’s slums. Jackman’s character, Denny, pays off prostitutes to keep them out of pimps’ hands (and takes his interactions with the street’s women beyond the professional). Craig plays his good-hearted Irish partner, Joey, who longs for Denny’s cozy nuclear family and comforts. If there’s one impressive thing about the show, it’s the memorization; Keith Huff’s play unfolds quickly, like a detective novel-meets-soap opera, and both Craig and Jackman yammer away in dialects without stopping for over 90 minutes. (There is no intermission.) The pair are so focused on volleying their lines that any interruptions can be disastrous—observe this video of Jackman responding with little humor to an audience member’s rogue cellphone ringer. Though the play has been sold out every night (marquee names have their perks) and Craig will be lauded for a solid Broadway debut (Jackman’s been all over the stage already, winning Tonys, hosting them, etc.), the real success story of A Steady Rain is Huff’s. The playwright wrote the noir-ish script in two weeks in 2005 while he was working a day job at a medical Web site in Chicago—he has since sold the rights to Hollywood for more than $1 million and is in talks for film and television projects.