INTERVIEW: From walking ‘Into the Woods’ to rocking out at ‘Rock of Ages’
Photo: PJ Griffith, CJ Eldred, Mitchell Jarvis, Jeannette Bayardelle and Kirsten Scott star in Rock of Ages along with Tom Galantich. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by Vivacity NY with permission.
Rock of Ages, the 1980s-drenched musical featuring hit songs from the decade, has returned off-Broadway, where it first premiered way back when. In the intervening years, this little show that could headed to Broadway and earned legions of fans.
Given its electric soundtrack, it’s no surprise that the production returned to where it all started, and now it’s playing an extended run through Jan. 12 at New World Stages in New York City.
One of the key players this time around is Broadway veteran Tom Galantich, who plays the role of Hertz. The character is a real estate developer who is looking to redevelop the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and that means a small rock club will have to close its doors for good. That is, unless the team can pull off one more big concert, stop the bulldozers and save the day.
This narrative, with Galantich playing the bad guy, is set to songs by Foreigner, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Whitesnake and Poison, among others. It’s a tongue-in-cheek sendup of ’80s culture, where mullets ruled the day, and fishnet stockings were acceptable for any type of party.
“It’s funny I’ve done so many things, and oftentimes I play the leading man, which can be fun sometimes,” Galantich said in a recent phone interview. “But it can also be sort of dry. I don’t want to say stilted, but you know how leading men are. They are what they are, and this role I thought would be just a lot of fun because it’s so different in terms of the journey that Hertz goes on. And just amidst all this craziness, amongst all this messiness that’s going on, Hertz has his story and then eventually joins in the fun. I just thought it would be really, really interesting, and I thought it would be a lot of fun.”
In the show, Hertz becomes the butt of many jokes, and his son is the one who breaks down his father’s rough exterior, hoping against hope that he might ditch his plans to redevelop this area of the city. Galantich, who has appeared on Broadway in Into the Woods, City of Angels and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, needs to perform the character with a German accent.
“I hope it’s good enough,” he said with a laugh. “We didn’t have a dialogue coach or an accent coach on the show, so I was just going based on movies. I thought back to the ’80s, since we’re set in the ’80s, and the villains in the ’80s all seemed to be either German or Russian. I thought of Hans Gruber from Die Hard, the great Alan Rickman, and in terms of using that sort of accent, which was suggestive of German, as opposed to being completely all down that road. So those were the type of models I used from those movies to try and capture that time period and era.”
Galantich said he was an adult during the 1980s when this popular music was blaring on the radio. He definitely became a fan of bands like Foreigner and Journey, but he left the harder stuff, like heavy metal, to other listeners. Joining Rock of Ages has been a delight because he can relive some of those earlier radio memories.
“Who didn’t like Foreigner and Journey and people like that,” he said. “You couldn’t not be a fan of it at the time. It was prevalent on the radio.”
The acting bug bit Galantich at an early age. He was probably in the third or fourth grade when he performed in his first play, and he thought to himself that the experience was fun and rewarding — and he’d like to do it again.
“It allowed me to enjoy the things that I liked to do the most, which was make people laugh and have fun,” he said. “So, yes, I was bitten early, and I was just a huge fan of old movies. I grew up in the New York area, actually on Long Island, and they had this thing, I think it was called The Million Dollar Movie. We only had a few channels, and they would reshow the same movie for five days in a row on this station here in New York. … I come home from school to kill time if I wasn’t out playing, and I’d watch a movie. And sometimes you’d watch a movie for the five days of the week. I’m fascinated by how the actors did it and how the movies are, so that kind of bit me that way.”
This early influence led him to take up acting and singing as a profession, and he eventually landed a standby role in the original Broadway production of Into the Woods. He signed on the dotted line, but didn’t expect to make it on stage for quite some time. Little did he know what would happen next.
“I actually joined the company of the original production of Into the Woods, and I was replacing somebody in the show,” he said. “And I was a standby in the show, which meant that I was off-stage, and I understudied a few of the principal roles. It was at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York. This was the James Lapine production, and after about three days of starting work on the show, I got a call in the evening saying, ‘You’re on tonight.’ I said, ‘Um, that’s impossible.’ They said, ‘No, no, we’ll get you through it. Don’t worry about it.’ So I actually went on as the prince’s steward after a few days being with the show.”
Galantich, who has also performed in Mamma Mia!, Boys From Syracuse and Don’t Dress for Dinner, had not undergone any rehearsals yet. He didn’t even know the lines. Uh oh.
“They led me around backstage, showed me my lines before the next scene and said, ‘Go. We’ll meet you on the other side of the stage when you come off,'” he remembers. “So my actual Broadway debut was probably the proverbial actor’s nightmare of being out on stage and having to know lines that you barely know and having to do things that you barely know. Believe it or not, that was my Broadway debut, which was shocking, and it went swimmingly well thanks to the entire cast and the stage management crew that sent me out there. So I kind of lived the actor’s nightmare as my Broadway debut. The stage manager would literally hold the book in my face and run the lines with me before the next scene and say, ‘OK, you go out there. You’re going to stand next to this character, and that ramp that’s on the other side of the stage won’t be there. It’ll be steps the next time you come off, so we’ll meet you over there.’ Craziness, craziness, but a blast — it’s a great memory. It’s an absolute great memory, and the cast was marvelous.”
Those early days have led to an impressive career — a career that now includes rocking out at Rock of Ages.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Rock of Ages, featuring Tom Galantich, is currently playing New World Stages in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
