A Stand-Up Guy

Any would-be stand up comedian would do well to get to the B Street Theater and watch Jack Gallagher’s “A Stand Up Guy.”

Gallagher, the three-time Emmy award winner, host of various TV shows, and Tonight Show with Johnny Carson comic (his favorite gig) has appeared in several movies and has lived his life’s dream since he was 10 years of age, for the past 41 years.

Now in a show written by Gallagher and son playwright/actor Declan Gallagher (who appears briefly in an hilarious piece about the grammatical uses of the f-word) the stand up comedian and story teller explains how he did it...and how this Fall River, Massachusetts native ended up making Sacramento his home and becoming one of its biggest entertainment assets.

Put very briefly, it’s by always doing the very best he could no matter what the job.  It also helps if you have the kind of supportive wife Gallagher has in Jean Ellen, to whom he has been married since 1980.

But the path to B Street (for which he has now written 8 different shows) was a rocky one, to put it mildly.  While Gallagher is a comedian, he is more a story teller than a joke teller.  He can tell a story that will keep you mesmerized (check his You Tube video “Letters to Declan,” the first of his one-man shows), but as popular as he may have been, the fact that he didn’t tell zippy jokes that brought audience applause every minute kept him off Carson’s “Tonight Show” through four auditions, for example.

His career has been a series of ups and downs, sometimes leaving him without an income entirely.  But he never gave up, and Jean Ellen never gave up believing in him.  Soon the ups were higher and the lows not quite as low.

The script of this show was shaped by the calendars he kept throughout his career (“in case I’m ever nominated to the Supreme Court,” he quips – his one political joke).  There were times when he was performing a show in the early afternoon in one state, and another at night in a different one...for weeks at a time.

But the work paid off and the gigs started to get more serious.  He nearly had his own sitcom, until the network pulled it for reasons which had nothing to do with Gallagher, but merely left him without work again.

In 1983, he was offered a job in Sacramento.  He was promised that he was going to be a Big Star on KCRA.  He and Jean weren’t sure they wanted to move to Sacramento, but at the time they were living in Los Angeles and hated it.  Sacramento, with its trees and older houses, reminded them of Massachusetts, so they gave it a try.

The show only lasted 9 months before it was canceled, but by this time, Gallagher was less frantic about his career and happy in Sacramento. He had appeared in concert with Dolly Parton, The Four Tops and Tony Bennett, had a recurring role on the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and appeared in a couple of movies, including “Heartbreak Ridge,” with Clint Eastwood.  He began writing shows for B Street.

Now he’s decided it is time to tell his story, from his first joke (on the golf course with his father when he was 10) through his 15 years of averaging 35 weeks a year on the road, to moving to television, to Sacramento, where he is now, happily living with his family and trying to figure out ways to stay off the road.

I’ve been a fan of Jack Gallagher ever since I saw him do Crystal ice cream commercials a long time ago.  I’ve seen several of his one-man shows.  Each one is quite different from the last, but I’ve never left the theater without smiling and raving about how wonderful it was.

“A Stand Up Guy” joins the list of other exceptional Jack Gallagher performances I have seen.  And his brief salute to the old B Street theater brought laughter and applause.

Concussed: Four Days in the Dark

 

I love Jack Gallagher.

No, wait a minute. I like Jack Gallagher very much. I learned that he is very selective about the people whom he claims to love, saving that term for those in his most intimate circle. Still, I can’t help but think that I really do love Jack Gallagher.

The comedian is opening his seventh one-man show and sixth for the B Street Theatre, his last being 2015’s popular “5 Songs,” a show about which he talks in this current production, “Concussed: Four Days in the Dark,” directed by Jerry Montoya.

Anybody who likes to bike (and who in Davis does not?) will relate to this story, which talks about Gallagher’s biking habits. In fact, the stage is set with huge interacting gears and a bike and the paraphernalia related to his love of biking.

It was, in fact, his love of biking that changed his life, and that ultimately brought about this show. Three years ago, while riding his bike home, he was hit by a car and three days later was diagnosed as having a traumatic brain injury.

The doctor ordered him to bed immediately. He was to stay in a darkened room with no stimuli whatsoever. No TV, no iPad, no radio, no internet, no nothing. He needed to give his brain a chance to heal.

This play, which is both touching and very funny, is like a free association of all the things you think of when you are trying not to think. His biggest fear was that he had lost the ability to find words.
Words are his life, and knowing how to find them, manipulate them, and the ability to cut and paste in his mind while doing a show to match the response of the audience was something he had done all of his professional career. What if he couldn’t do it anymore?

He was 61 when the accident happened, so he talked a lot about getting older, and the predominantly gray-haired audience laughed and nodded in agreement as he recounted, for example, how one gets out of bed when one reaches a certain age.

He talked of parenting his two sons, Declan and Liam, and what he wished he had done differently as a father. In fact, as he began to recover he took trips across the country with each of the boys, the northern route with Liam and the southern route with Declan, just being a couple of guys enjoying being together.

The experience of having a concussion, he believes, was transformative, and he says he’s become a better person as a result. He has learned the importance of being in the moment, not always living for the future. He learned the importance of speaking your love to those for whom you really love, and he even learned a little humility, now that he needs a few notes on stage during his 90-minute shows, something he was proud of not needing before.

(He admits that he can’t remember much about “5 Songs,” though one would not have known there was anything wrong, watching that show at the time.)

Gallagher is a remarkable comedian in that he knows how to work an audience, especially one like B Street, where the audience sits on three sides of the stage. At no point did anyone feel that they were just watching the back of his head. He had a way of unobtrusively involving everyone without being overly obvious about it. It was as if we were guests in his living room and he wanted to include all of us in his conversation.

He also made you feel like he was baring his soul just for you, while telling you that he is a very private person who bares his soul only to his most trusted friends and family.

Most in the audience were middle-aged or older but I think Gallagher’s humor would appeal to just about anyone. Well, maybe not to the two 20-somethings sitting next to me, one of whom slept through the whole show while the other thumbed through the program for 90 minutes. They missed something very special.

5 Songs

Jack Gallagher is the busiest Renaissance man whom you may never have heard of.

This three-time Emmy Award-winning playwright and comedian has played every comedy club in America (or so it seems from his bio), was a regular at The Improv in Los Angeles, appeared in movies, co-hosts the popular nationally syndicated public television show, “Money Track,” starred in his own sitcom (“Bringing up Jack”) and had a recurring role on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

He’s been on a number of talk/variety shows, including “The Tonight Show” (with both Johnny Carson and Jay Leno) and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” He was even the host of the California Lottery’s “Big Spin” from 1996 to 1998.

Yet, all I knew of him was that he was the friendly guy in the old Crystal ice cream commercials.

Gallagher’s new show, “5 Songs,” is the fifth show commissioned by the B Street Theatre, where it opened this past weekend and will run for the next six weeks. It is outstanding.

The central theme is the music of our lives, how sometimes it only takes a few notes of an old song to transport us back to another time and place, with memories that may be pleasant or may be unpleasant, but you can’t escape the story that accompanies that particular song.

The walls of the B Street Main Stage theater, by scenic designer Meg McGuigan, are lined with titles of songs that have special meaning to Gallagher. The audience is given a choice of four from a list of seven or eight. Each of the four sections of the audience selects a song, Gallagher selects the fifth, the rest are removed and the show is on.

Your show may be quite different from mine, as it will change every night, depending on the songs chosen.

With the accompaniment of Tommy Dunbar on guitar, Gallagher begins to reminisce about his memories connected to each particular song. The first song opening night, for example, was Phoebe Snow’s “Poetry Man,” which evoked a visceral reaction and then led to a lengthy description of what it is like to be the opening man for such names as Snow, Dolly Parton, Paul Simon and Tony Bennett, among many others, living life on the road and being the guy nobody wanted to see because everyone was there for the headliner. Some experiences were very bad; some were not so bad (and Bennett, apparently, was the best).

Gallagher has an easy delivery that makes the audience feel as if they were sitting in his living room listening to this delightful man tell them stories from his past.

The most poignant of the songs discussed was “Danny Boy,” which brought up stories of his complicated childhood, his relationship with his parents and how their idiosyncracies shaped his life and turned him into the parent he has become to his two now-adult children. It a beautiful piece and anyone who shares some of the experiences he describes will be moved to tears.

Junior Walker’s “What Does It Take?” opened the door to Gallagher’s memories of his first job, working 13 hours a day in an ice warehouse at age 15, and of developing a work ethic that has followed him the rest of his life.

This is a two-act show, the second act being much shorter than the first, but the time flies by and when it ends, you wish you’d had a chance to hear what he had to say about the songs that did not get selected.

It was a delightful evening spent with a likable guy, who makes doing something very difficult look very easy.

But I missed the ice cream.