Joz Norris enjoyed sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and Soho Theatre for his "very stupid character comedy show" Joz Norris Is Hugh Jackman Is The Phantom Of The Opera, which also won Best Show at the Leicester Comedy Festival in 2026. Here he explains the thinking behind recreating one of stage's great villains... as Hugh Jackman.
I first saw The Phantom Of The Opera when I was a teenager, and I imagine what caused me to become obsessed with it was the same thing that causes a lot of shy, insular teenagers to get swept up by it — the melodrama! The tragedy! The romance!
There's something about the masked, isolated, misunderstood figure who conceals the soul of an artist who's just desperate to connect but never can that appeals to sensitive, awkward people who struggle to talk to other humans. Also the songs are wall-to-wall bangers.
So it was a big deal for me for a while. I used to belt the soundtrack out to myself in my room at uni until I realised with mortification that the walls were thinner than I thought. After a while, the Phantom slinked off to the back of my consciousness, where he lingered, rarely at the forefront of my mind but always skulking through my subconscious, until last year.
"He was nowhere near as tragic and misunderstood as I remembered. He's kind of a colossal prat, in truth."
Last year, my friend Luke Rollason, knowing I was a fan of the musical, asked me if I would host a comedy show he was organising in character as the Phantom. So I revisited the musical to research the story while writing my set for it. I was surprised how different the story looked to me now — this Phantom guy was objectively a really horrible dude! Even before he murders two people to try and sleep with a teenage girl, he's been grooming her from childhood by pretending to be her dead dad's ghost. He was nowhere near as tragic and misunderstood as I remembered, he's kind of a colossal prat, in truth. The idea that if you're sufficiently talented then one day someone will recognise the wounded human soul deep within, no matter how terribly you've behaved, is basically a narcissistic power fantasy.
"He would keep showing up to things uninvited via a network of complicated trapdoors you didn't realise he had installed in your house"
The show is aware of this on some level — he is the villain, after all — but it also really encourages us to empathise with him and even root for him, and he's the one granted a transcendent finale, not Christine. If you knew this guy, you would cut ties with him pretty much immediately (although he would probably keep showing up to things uninvited via a network of complicated trapdoors you didn't realise he had installed in your house). And yet his story moves people to tears nightly in the West End. And I found that, despite finding the story kind of icky, the songs were still wall-to-wall bangers, and I was still swept up by the wrenching melodrama of it all.
Meanwhile, I'd been feeling like I'd recently crossed a bit of a threshold in my personal and professional life — nothing major, but you reach a point in your 30s where life stops feeling like it's full of infinite possibilities and choices, and the business of living starts to feel more like a case of wrestling with the outcomes of the choices you've made up until now, whatever they may be. So it was funny to be thinking a lot about that and then to re-engage with this thing from my youth which felt both the same and different at the same time, so that my memory of what it meant to me was both true and untrue.
"It's an exploration of regret and making choices about what you want your life to be"
At the same time, I'd been writing a character based on Hugh Jackman that I'd been gigging a bit purely because I find Hugh Jackman incredibly funny and for some reason he had become my muse. For completely unrelated reasons, I learned that 20 years ago he had been offered the role of the Phantom in the movie of the musical but turned it down. I'm sure the real Hugh Jackman hasn't spent the last two decades regretting that decision, but it seemed like a funny jumping-off point for a show to pretend that he had, and to write something exploring his yearning to revisit that choice and find out what his life might have been if he had given in to his adolescent desire to become the Phantom. Something about that idea really appealed to me and the ideas I often end up exploring in my shows about performed identity and the gap between how we're perceived and who we think we are.
It's an exploration of regret and making choices about what you want your life to be, and it's also a celebration of two things I have loved and still love and which I find inherently very silly and which also still tug on my heartstrings. Because the older you get, the more you realise that most things in life do a bit of both.
Joz Norris Is Hugh Jackman Is The Phantom Of The Opera is on at the Pleasance Theatre on 17, 18 and 19 December 2026.
