Profile: Steve Galluccio

Enfant Terrible

Steve Galluccio's script for the film Funkytown has received virtually unanimous raves—but his roots are in theatre and he is never far away from it.

by Richard Burnett (reprinted from Hour with permission)

I vividly remember a blustery winter day back in the mid-1980s when Montreal radio and TV icon Douglas "Coco" Leopold—dolled up in the biggest fur coat I'd ever seen—cruised me as he was leaving the glorious old Four Seasons Hotel (today the Omni Hotel) at the corner of Peel and Sherbrooke streets.

It was also at the Four Seasons in the early 1980s when bitchy Montreal enfant terrible, playwright and screenwriter Steve Galluccio, then all of 22, met Leopold.

"Douglas had put an ad in a magazine looking for an assistant," Galluccio, now 50, recalls. "So I called the number and he answered the phone! I was a huge fan of Douglas—he was such an icon for us at that time—and he said, 'I'm getting a pedicure this afternoon so meet me at the Four Seasons. In the end I didn't take the job because I didn't know what he wanted me to do! But having a job interview while he was getting a pedicure was the most brilliantly bizarre thing I'd ever seen in my life! Tell you the truth, I don't know if he was playing a role or if he was really like that."

News: Galluccio's Mambo hits West Coast in April

Steve Galluccio's mega-hit Mambo Italiano will be playing Vancouver in April. Galluccio, a CharPo contributor, has seen the play performed worldwide. It was a hit here both in French (Cie Jean-Duceppe) and English (Centaur)

Details of the Vancouver production here.

First Person: A Day in the life of...Steve Galluccio

So it’s been kinda crazy these days, the way I like it. I just got back from dinner with Denise Robert at Nizza then my boyfriend and I headed off to the TNM to catch “Le dieu du carnage”. A sublime production, which is just as good as the one I saw starring Gandolfini on Broadway last year was...

So now I’m back home (my boyfriend’s and my future home) and I am about to settle down to work on Mambo 2. Denise suggested I write a sequel, I figured the time was right, I wrote a first draft which she loved and now I’m working on a second, because she wants to shoot next summer. We had lunch with Ginette (Reno) last week and she’s on board, now the question is, will the others join in too? 

Denise and I are also co-producing a Québécois version of “39 Steps”: we acquired the rights after we both fell in love with the play last year in New York and it should be up and running in 2012. We’ve secured the venue (a 900 seater no–less) we had it translated, we hired a director and now it’s all about budgets and finding our actors. But that’s easy,  my real challenge this week is to find an outfit to wear next Tuesday for my interview  I have  on Musimax to plug “Funkytown”. It’s the first of many, Funkytown has the biggest buzz of any project I was involved in since Mambo, the movie. I was told that a character on “Tout Sur Moi” mentioned the movie (I don’t know in what context as my PVR is busted).