Fox 2000 is indulging Hugh Jackman’s tippy-toe fantasies by planning to remake the movie musical Carousel as a star vehicle for him. Variety says Hugh is on board and even producing, in conjunction with his Seed Productions partner John Palermo.

The original film was released in 1956 and starred Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae in the story of a carnival barker whose bad temper lands him in the middle of a botched robbery and leads to his death. He ends up in Purgatory, and gets one day to go back to the living world and fix whatever issues he left behind, in particular a rebellious teenager. It’s kind of like Heaven Can Wait, without the animal component.

Hugh will play the carnival barker, a guy named Billy Bigalow. He’s actually played the part before, he sang the role in a 2002 Carnegie Hall performance.

It’s great that Hugh Jackman is so multi-talented, but did anyone else notice that his affinity for swishy roles is starting to affect his performance as Wolverine? I’d swear that in X-Men 3 he was ready to break out into a little song and dance number at any moment. What happened to the indifferent, feral berserker? Let’s hope his latest musical foray doesn’t screw up his Wolverine spin-off. It’s still slated to happen, but can Hugh get back to playing that gruff, tough character after spending so much time dancing his way across the screen in some sort of strange, mutated impression of Bing Crosby? Luck for him, at least half of his fans are women.

You’ll be seeing a lot of Hugh Jackman through the rest of this year. This fall he shows up in Christopher Nolan’s next movie The Prestige and then in Darren Aronofsky’s long longed for epic The Fountain.