At the end of the day, we’re all still a bunch of theatre kids, aren’t we? Show people are, at their core, a consistently dramatic lot, but as Left on Tenth star Peter Gallagher can attest, our non-theatrical loved ones can sometimes struggle to comprehend our world of imagination.
“I think Grease was probably the first show my parents ever saw on Broadway,” Gallagher shares, chuckling. “My father didn't realize that I was Danny Zuko, and at the intermission, he said, ‘So when's Peter coming out?’ And my mother, ‘Tom, he’s right there’. Greased hair and a leather jacket made me unrecognizable to my own father.”
The son of proudly practical Irish Americans, Gallagher’s career as an endlessly charming performer was wholly self inspired. “Theatre was not the world I came from. No theatre, no music, no experience at all with that world.” The youngest of three children, Gallagher poured himself into his passionate pursuit of art with little oversight, navigating his own contracts and career changes on the fly after making his Broadway debut in the 1977 revival of Hair. Nearly 50 years later, he remains one of the standard-bearers of mid-century Broadway artists, with a seemingly inexhaustible “get the show on the road” attitude. That wasn't always the case, however.
"I went through a really difficult time once I left The Real Thing," Gallagher recalls of the 1984 Tom Stoppard play where he starred alongside Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Christine Baranski, and Cynthia Nixon. "I lost all my confidence. When you're 29, it's almost like a mini midlife crisis, where you have a chance to become the person you want to be, or you can keep banging your head against the wall. The one thing I wanted to feel was authentic in my craft, and I didn't trust myself."
When producer Manny Azenberg found out about Gallagher's retreat from the industry, he pulled out every trick in the book to inspire Gallagher back into the audition room. "I will love him forever. He said, 'Hey, Peter, it's Manny. Listen, I'm Jewish, but half of me is Italian. And if you don't come in tomorrow and audition for this part, I'm going to break both your fucking legs'." Gallagher pauses, briefly overcome. "I was so moved by that, that he cared. And I said, fighting back to tears, 'Thank you, Manny. I'll be there'."
That audition turned into a production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, netting Gallagher a Tony nomination while providing him with living proof that career confidence issues don't ever truly go away; you simply learn to live with them for the love of your art.
"Jack Lemmon was a powerful, powerful person for me, and he played our Father. Jack and I got very close as father and son. When he was really on after a show, he'd say, 'Hey, kid, listen, you want to do a little work after the show? I'll buy you a sandwich.'" Gallagher busts out a pitch perfect Lemmon impression, laughing. "And that meant that once we'd seen our guests and so on, we'd go back out onto the stage, which was just lit by the ghost light, and work on the scenes. And he would say, 'I know what I did was good, but how do I do it again?' I remember one night near the end of the run, he was leaving, and he asked 'Hey kid, you got anything lined up yet?' I said, 'No Jack'. And he said, 'Me neither.' And he left, and I realized 'Oh my God, it's never going to change.' That was a powerful experience."
The always-shifting future of a performer can be a difficult life, but if a person is willing to wholly commit to the troubadour lifestyle, miracles can be around every corner. For Gallagher, regaining his confidence was simply a matter of harnessing the dogged determination he had in his early days.
“I got both of my first jobs from open calls,” Gallagher recalls. “I’d get there right at the crack of dawn, and stuck to the door of the audition room would be a clipboard with yellow legal paper and tons and tons and tons of names, and you’d go to the end of the last stack and put your name in, and I was always number 2,000-something. And then you’d go get on the end of a block's long line, clutching your headshot and your resume (special skills: driving), and just stay there until 10am when the door would open and you'd begin to inch forward. That’s how I got Hair, and how I got Grease. Just inching, inching forward. I told my college buddy that I was going to audition for everything, no matter what, and that eventually paid off.”
Pay off, it has. While Gallagher has gone on to enjoy a highly influential career on screen across shows like The O.C., Californication, Law and Order SVU, Grace and Frankie, Covert Affairs, and more, he has always made a point of returning to Broadway, no matter what. He's currently back now in the romantic comedy Left on Tenth at the James Earl Jones Theatre, where night after night, he is wooing Julianna Margulies in a rare late-in-life love story by Delia Ephron.
“I’ll always come back to Broadway,” Gallagher states firmly. “I might do a couple of movies, but I’m always going to come back.”
