INTERVIEW WITH ACTOR PETER GALLAGHER


Education Dramaturg Ted Sod interviews On the Twentieth Century actor Peter Gallagher.


Ted Sod: Where were you born and educated, Peter?


Peter Gallagher: I was born in New York City in Lenox Hill Hospital and grew up in Armonk, NY, where I went to Byram Hills High School and then to Tufts University in Boston—where I met my wife.


TS: Did you have great teachers who have influenced you?


PG: I have been very lucky to have had, and still have, some amazing teachers—they are really important. Mr. Gene P. Bissell was my music teacher in high school, and he was the one that introduced me to the theatre. He had worked in New York professionally years before. He was a wonderful pianist and composer. It was on one of his field trips that I saw my first Broadway show (Hello Dolly with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway and a young Morgan Freeman in the chorus). It was my first exposure to anything like that, and he also introduced me to the discipline of the theatre. I did a bunch of shows with him and learned a lot and will always be grateful to him.


TS: Did you always know you could sing?


PG: No. I suspected that I could because I would do impressions of people like Dean Martin. To me, they sounded pretty good, but I'd never sung in front of anybody. In fact, I was misbehaving in Mr. Bissell's music class, and I remember, in an effort to humiliate me, he had me stand up and said, “Okay, sing this solo by yourself.” It was sort of a pivotal moment because I was deeply terrified but I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of embarrassing me, so I thought, “Goddammit, I'm going to give this my best shot.” I guess it was okay because he didn't say anything after I was through—although I was the only one in the class he didn’t ask to be in the first show—I got my chance on the second one, Pajama Game, and never looked back.


TS: Why did you choose to do On the Twentieth Century and to play Oscar Jaffee?


PG: Because Oscar Jaffee is a great role. Throughout my career, I've always come back to the theatre because that's where I've always gotten the best roles. I've wanted to work with Kristin Chenoweth for years. Scott Ellis is an old friend of mine. We started off our careers in a bus-and-truck tour of Grease in the '70s. I also had the good fortune of working with Betty Comden and Adolph Green and Hal Prince on the very next show that they did after On the Twentieth Century, which was A Doll's Life. A Doll's Life was a pretty big flop, but it's still one of my favorite experiences. I've learned that whether a show hits or misses, it doesn't have any relationship to the quality of the experience you have in helping put it together. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have this role in this production. This is the first day of rehearsal, so fingers shall remain crossed for months.


TS: What kind of preparation or research do you have to do in order to play Oscar?


PG: I've been working on the music with my wonderful singing teacher, Joan Lader, for a little while—it's a lot of big singing. I've been


16 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


researching great theatre artists of the period, in particular, David Belasco. I think Betty and Adolph were intrigued with Belasco, as well. Some people think of him as a genius who insisted on the most natural kind of settings, detail, lighting, and acting. Other people think he was just a hack. Between idiot and genius, there's a lot of fun to be had with a character like Jaffee.


TS: What are some of your early thoughts about the character of Oscar?


PG: He very much believes in the long shot and the power and the importance of what he does. He thinks every moment in life could be improved with a little salesmanship and stagecraft. I love the fact that Oscar has to write a play in 16 hours. I also love the fact that Belasco, who didn't have the benefit of Chekhov or other great playwrights, wrote a lot of the plays he produced himself. Some of the plays are really cool, and some of them were not so great, but he wrote over 200 plays! That’s extraordinary. I'm looking forward to finding that intersection of art and life for Oscar. For him, the theatre is like life and death. It's that important. It's a vocation. It's a calling. He’ll do whatever he needs to do at the moment to make the moment work. When Belasco did a show that required a laundry set or kitchen set he would insist that they be fully functioning, so the audience would believe in what was happening. He put an active, functioning laundry on stage so the actors would be actually washing clothes. If it was a kitchen scene, actors would actually fry eggs so the smell of food would waft into the audience. Belasco was all about capturing the right light. He would study light. It was all an attempt to create real life on the stage as closely as he possibly could.


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