I was 14 years old when I first listened to the Broadway recording of the musical “Spring Awakening.” I’m pretty sure I was a bit too young to be listening to it, since I gathered very little from the themes of tortured adolescence. Last month, however, I revisited the recording and immediately became enthralled by the character of Moritz Stiefel, the “anxious misfit” who I saw myself in.
In a phone interview with The Michigan Daily, Tony Award-winning actor and singer-songwriter John Gallagher Jr. (“Short Term 12”) talked about playing the role of Moritz Stiefel during the 2006 Broadway production of “Spring Awakening.”
“He’s kind of the most relatable,” Gallagher said. “When you feel like you’re in a society that doesn’t care whether you exist or not, I feel like that’s so human. Everybody goes through that at some point in their life … I don’t know if anything can really touch ‘Spring Awakening.’ It mattered to people and still matters to people in a way nothing else I’ve done has ever quite come close.”
Gallagher is gearing up to return to Broadway this fall in The Avett Brothers’ “Swept Away” musical. “Swept Away,” directed by Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”), follows four survivors of a shipwreck during the 19th century.
“I’ve been working on ‘Swept Away’ for seven years,” Gallagher said. “I didn’t think it was going to go to Broadway, I didn’t really see it happening. And so, I’m overwhelmed and totally glad to be proven wrong because I had made my mind on it.”
The last time Gallagher performed in a Broadway musical was when he originated the role of Johnny in Green Day’s American Idiot in 2010. However, Gallagher’s journey back to Broadway hasn’t been without its difficulties. During the interview, he shared that he is currently attending physical therapy because of an issue with his IT band on his right hip. It has been eight years since Gallagher has been part of a Broadway production — when he played Edmund Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” — and he believes his new role will be a demanding challenge, but also welcomes it.
“I chase down the things that are the most exciting to me from an artistic standpoint,” he said. “I said yes to ‘Swept Away’ before a script was even written … I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is the most incredible role anyone’s ever asked me to play.’ And the material is so intense, so demanding and challenging, that I wanted to get wrapped up in it.”
But before Gallagher returns to the Theater District of New York City, he is hitting the road alongside Bandits On The Run — an indie-folk-pop-Americana trio based in Brooklyn, N.Y. — to perform his solo music to audiences. Gallagher began releasing his own music in 2016 with the album Six Day Hurricane, although he had recorded it four years prior.
“I was a little scared to put out my own music,” Gallagher said. “I was hung up on other people’s perceptions.”
He feared that no one would like it or take him seriously as a musician. But one day, while attending a show in Central Park, he had an epiphany: “Oh man, what am I doing? I’m sitting on my own record when I could be putting it out to the world and sharing it with people.”
Gallagher’s new album, Goodbye or Something, displays more vulnerability than previously expressed in his music; Gallagher began writing the bulk of the songs coming off a decade-long relationship.
“I was feeling super lost and isolated and alienated … The only lifeline I felt I had at the time was songwriting because it’s something that I always kept coming back to through the years, as a catharsis and as a companion,” he explained. “It really does feel like ‘Here’s a decade of my life in 11 songs and 45 minutes.’”
Gallagher mentioned that he almost did not release Goodbye or Something. Although he spent his own money to record the album, he often felt uncertain about releasing its slate of songs, even a few months before its recent release. However, he discusses the role that fear has played in all his favorite artistic decisions.
“I love it when I see an artist just be like ‘Here it is. This is it. This is all there is,’” he said. “I think it registers with people and they tend to be quite generous and open in their embrace of you as an artist … For me, it’s like nothing is more exciting than when you really feel like you’re having an exchange with your audience.” His upcoming performance in Ann Arbor will be his first time playing in this city, and it’s sure to be a really exciting show.
Goodbye or Something is available to stream and buy on major platforms. You can see John Gallagher Jr. with Bandits On The Run at The Ark on July 24 at 8 p.m.
Daily Arts Contributor Jovanna Gallegos can be reached at jovanna@umich.edu.
The post Between roles and rhythms: John Gallagher Jr. on Broadway and music appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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