NEW YORK (EYT) – Hugh Jackman will be doing a world tour this summer, and a Brockway Area Junior-Senior High School student was a part of its first performance.
[PICTURED: Sydney Manno (front right) in a photo provided by The Today Show.]
Jackman is doing The Man. The Music. The Show. It is an arena tour starting in May that brings in musical selections from The Greatest Showman and Les Misérables, along with a few other songs from different shows. To promote it, Jackman performed on The Today Show.
“I will be Hugh Jackman’s backup dancer for his Les Misérables medley,” said Brockway sophomore Sydney Manno before leaving for New York. “I’ll also do a song from The Greatest Showman. I’m very excited!”
Manno attended a program in New York City called Gather NYC. She was one of 20 dancers picked to take part in the Today Show kickoff of Jackman’s tour. Before going to New York, Manno only had a little information about the performance.
“We were told to wear black and be ready to be on camera,” she said. “We have to be there at five in the morning, and they’ll teach us the dance. Hugh Jackman will come in around 6:30 to practice with us. We’ll perform the dance at 7:30!”
Even with that scant information, Manno felt prepared. Along with Gathered NYC, a summer intensive program that boasts 11 hours a day of training, Manno has been dancing since third grade. She started competition in seventh. Locally, she has worked with April’s School of Dance in St. Marys, Van Dyke Ballet in Punxsutawney, and Dancer Studio in Clarion.
“The opportunities to do dance aren’t very obvious,” she said. “I have to work hard for that opportunity.”
Mano wants to pursue a career in musical theater when she graduates, and being on The Today Show and dancing in the same performance as Hugh Jackman is too good of a chance to pass up.
“This is helping me get closer to my goals,” she said.
Manno found that New York City and Brockway are very different at four in the morning.
“It was dark at four in the morning, but everyone was there and ready to work like it was 9 a.m.,” she said. “That’s a big difference from Brockway. There’s not much bustle at 4 a.m. in Brockway!”
Manno and the other dancers were told that they were there as professionals and not fans. While they didn’t ask for autographs or scream when they saw him, the dancers barely managed to contain their emotions when meeting The Greatest Showman and X-Men star.
“He was amazing,” Manno said. “He was such a nice man. He was everything you’d want him to be. He was so appreciative of the hard work people were doing for him. And he always had a smile on his face.”
The dance was simpler than Manno thought it would be, which she said was a good thing because they didn’t have a lot of time to practice.
“We got there and had to practice for an hour to have everything perfect for Hugh Jackman to arrive!” she said. “We didn’t have much dancing, but more movement. It was intense. Everyone was excited to be there.
For Manno, the entire experience was surreal.
“Everyone there was so chill that it didn’t feel like national television at all,” she said. “It didn’t feel real until I watched it at my house. You’re walking and here comes Al Roker coming out of the bushes to interview his next person!”
Manno worked with the other dancers at Gather NYC, and this was a chance to meet up with old friends as well as meet a celebrity.
“I got to see some of my friends from this summer,” she said. “We got to dance together again. When they live across the country, you don’t know when that time will be again. So being together, dancing together, doing what you love together – it’s something that I won’t forget.”
Watch some of the performance, and Manno’s flag waving, on the Today Show website.
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