Album: Launch - Steve Galluccio's In Piazza San Domenico

Steve Galluccio autographing his book

STEVE GALLUCCIO LAUNCHES PAPERBACK OF HIS HIT PLAY 'IN PIAZZA SAN DOMENICO'

By Richard Burnett (Photos: Richard Burnett)

Montreal playwright Steve Galluccio – best-known for scripting the films Mambo Italiano and Funkytown – launched the paperback version of his hit 2010 play In Piazza San Domenico at Montreal's Centaur Theatre on September 11.

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."

After Dark, January 11, 2011

WildSide, CharPo and Beyond


by Gaëtan L. Charlebois


What a week it has been!

The WildSide Festival was very, very good to CharPo. Our traffic exploded and our contributors, who were everywhere, heard lots of great reaction to this site. The comment most often made was that we offer an immediacy to the theatre dialogue - reviews come out fast and are spread quickly, shared over and over again via Twitter and Facebook. It's also great that the internet allows us to review shows which run two or three nights (as we did with Hamlet, Match Made in Hell, and Mike Birbiglia's My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) and these reviews seem to be appreciated by the readers and artists. (Birbiglia, for instance, tweeted my review of his show to his 50,000 followers and in the ten minutes following his tweet, we experienced a 500 pageview spike on the site - which normally pulls in 150-250 pageviews per day. The dialogue about the show broadened to people from the US, even after the show moved on to Oceania.) So appreciated that our site doubled it's previous record, this week (and that's even if you remove the statistical anomaly caused by the Birbiglian spike).

What WildSide also caused was a lively exchange amongst the CharPo people about how shows should be handled - profiled, reviewed or both - and who CharPo is for. We decided both profiled and reviewed. Identifying who we are meant for is a bit more complex.

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.

After Dark - December 7, 2010

By Gaëtan L. Charlebois (Editor-in-Chief) I am astounded by the success of The Charlebois Post after a single week online. I am also enormously thankful to be surrounded by collaborators who like theatre and its people so much. The ideas and the writing here have certainly struck a chord with our readers and with me.

Steve Galluccio's piece, for instance, offers an important lesson: to carve out a good career in this business you not only need talent, you have to work your ass off. But Galluccio's piece also reminds that it's also about how you approach the work (a dinner with a producer is not only good business it can also be pleasant) and moreover, you'd better enjoy the work you do. In our business, we can spot lazy, jaded malcontents a mile off: it shows in sloppiness on the stage, it shows in inelegant PR, in aimless texts and it shows in tired (and ultimately tiresome) reporting. As one professor of mine reminded his theatre students over and over again: it's not called "play" for nothing.

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).