Entertainment

Newspaper tiger

Hugh
Jackman won his Tony Award swishing around Broadway in “The Boy From Oz” wearing tight-fitting leopard pants and singing “When my baby smiles at me, I go to Rio.” His was some of the most intense swishing I’ve ever seen on a stage (although Brooks Ashmanskas in “Promises, Promises” runs a close second), and legions of middle-class housewives from New Jersey would gladly fork over next month’s mortgage payment to see him do it again.

But these days, Jackman seems bent on playing men with hair on their chests.

Last fall, he appeared as a tough, heavy-drinking Chicago cop in “A Steady Rain.” And just the other week, he played a tough, heavy-drinking tabloid newspaper columnist in a reading of a new play by Nora Ephron.

The play, called “Stories About McAlary,” is based on the life of the late New York Post and Daily News columnist Mike McAlary.

The reading was meant to be a big secret, but this tough, Sancerre-sipping tabloid theatrical columnist got the scoop.

Mike Nichols directed the reading, which also starred Sarah Paulson and Richard Kind, who was hilarious as former Daily News editor Jim Willse.

Fred Zollo and Bob Cole, who produced “A Steady Rain,” are putting up the money, along with Colin Callender, former president of HBO Films.

Although many people thought Jackman was miscast — he’s more “Music Man” than newspaperman — he’s such a box-office draw that, if he commits to the play, it could end up on Broadway next year.

“Stories About McAlary” is a loosely structured series of scenes about McAlary’s life and the stories he covered, including the Abner Louima case, for which he won a Pulitzer.

“It’s kind of an oral history of the guy,” one person says.

While the play suffers from its loose structure, it does, sources say, do an excellent job of evoking New York City during the 1980s and ’90s, when Mc-Alary’s name sold papers.

It also captures the color and jangle of the newsroom when newspapers reigned supreme.

(Ephron knows all about that — she was a Post reporter herself for several years and is married to screenwriter Nick Pileggi, an old UPI man.)

Real-life newspapermen flit through the play — Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton and John Cotter, who was The Post’s metro editor from 1989 to 1991.

In addition to the Louima case, “Stories About McAlary” deals with the columnist’s biggest screw-up: In 1995, he wrongly accused a lesbian of making up a rape charge to publicize feminist causes.

She sued, and in court he was forced to admit that he made up some of the anonymous quotations in his columns.

Since “Stories About McAlary” is just that, I’ll leave you with one that’s made the rounds of The Post newsroom for years:

McAlary was on a plane to Israel when the first Scud missile fell on Tel Aviv during the first Gulf war.

After the plane landed, he filed a column saying that, when the captain announced the missile attack, “the passengers fell to their knees in prayer.”

When an editor pointed out that Jews don’t pray on their knees, Cotter, the Post metro editor, snapped: “I don’t care about 5,000 years of tradition. If McAlary says it happened, then it happened.”

But when McAlary called in from his hotel room and was asked about it, he hesitated and said: “Actually, I was sitting in first-class and they told me that everybody in the back of the plane was praying. So I assumed they were on their knees. You’d better change it.”

michael.riedel@nypost.com