By Victor Greto
NEW YORK CITY — Every night when Johnny Gallagher Jr. finishes his job in Manhattan, he rides the subway across the East River to his small apartment in the Astoria section of Queens.
“I eat a peanut butter sandwich and go to bed, and it’s all kind of boring,” the Wilmington native says.
Just one of millions of lonely stories in the Naked City.
Except that it’s not.
That ride is the daily dénouement of a Neon-Winking, Toe-Tapping, Show-Stopping Mother of All Success Stories.
Because, regardless of whether Gallagher, 22, wins a Tony tonight as best featured actor in a musical, he plays the main character in “Spring Awakening,” one of the biggest hits of this year’s Broadway season.
It’s his second Broadway play and his first musical.
“It’s all very sudden and exciting,” he says during a hectic pre-Tony week. “There’s always stuff coming out of the woodwork now, and I’m looking at scripts, and there may be more if I win, but the good news is that my career has been on such a natural, quick timeline.”
It’s an overnight success story that’s been 10 years in the making, starting at Delaware Children’s Theatre, with stops on television and in the movies.
“It’s so mind-boggling that he’s such a normal down-to-earth guy, goofy and fun, and that he’s a Tony nominee,” says one of his best friends, Seth Kirschner, 23, also a Wilmington native and an actor who lives near Gallagher in Astoria.
Gallagher and Kirschner became friends while cutting their acting teeth at the children’s theater.
“We never thought it would escalate so well,” says Kirschner. “You can tell with him by the way he carries himself that he knows exactly what he’s doing.”
That includes Gallagher zoning out in front of the TV chewing a peanut butter sandwich, the yin to the yang of getting into the zone of acting and singing in a hit Broadway musical.
“There’s not really time for a night life, sadly,” Gallagher says. “We have eight shows a week, and the vocal load of the show is quite demanding and you have to rest your muscles.”
And there’s more.
Gallagher also is part of a successful four-piece band called Old Springs Pike, which he characterizes as acoustic folk “punked up.” (Go to www.oldspringspike.com for a listen).
They just played at the Ars Nova theater on 54th Street.
“It’s surreal,” he says of his multilayered success. “I’m doing a lot of processing, but a lot of it won’t hit me till much later.”
“He’s aware he’s living a dream right now,” says Cathy Snyder, 50, who has known Gallagher since he got his first acting job a decade ago as Tom Sawyer at the Delaware Children’s Theatre.
She often attended his band’s concerts when he lived here, and she’s seen “Spring Awakening” several times.
Gallagher talks to everyone out at the stage door after each performance, she says.
“I stand there and think, ‘This is amazing, it’s so great to watch.’
“He has the ability to know that it’s wonderful, but he hasn’t changed. He’s grounded with his talent, but knows he was in the right place at the right time.
“What kid at 22 knows themselves that way?”
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When he was 8 years old, Johnny Gallagher’s mom plopped him down in front of the TV to watch “West Side Story.” He wished it was “The Terminator.”
He loved movies already, especially “Ghosbusters.” But musicals?
“I was a movie nerd before I understood what movies were,” Gallagher says. “I would obsess about movies and watch them over and over again, and learn all the lines and wander around the house and recite them.”
But “West Side Story,” the 1961 Oscar-winning movie of the hit Broadway play, was different.
He became intrigued by the mix of the musical’s depth of characterization and flawless choreography and singing.
“Everyone as a performer in the show was connected to those characters,” he says. “Everyone seemed like they really were who they were playing.”
Gallagher fixated on Russ Tamblyn, who played Riff, the leader of the Jets. Gallagher never had experienced one actor’s seamless mesh of acting, dance and song. Soon after, he also saw Tamblyn in the 1954 MGM musical, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”
It was the first time he saw a good actor play two different but equally convincing characters.
“Actors could have multiple jobs and play different characters, and that was exciting,” he says.
Gallagher had been acting, however, long before “West Side Story,” says his sister Joni, 25. She also lives in New York City and is studying to be a teacher.
“We’d get a camcorder and come up with these crazy things, and he had the most character-driven roles,” she says. “I was in the third grade and he was in first grade. Johnny and my cousins and myself had my mom tape us making movies in the backyard.”
Couple those experiences with Joni and Johnny following their folk musician parents, John and June Gallagher, especially to the annual Philadelphia folk festival, and you can see more than enough inspiration for a budding musician and actor.
“I grew up just as much at home as back in the corner drinking cokes in O’Freel’s (a now-defunct Wilmington bar) hearing Celtic and Irish folk music,” Gallagher says.
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Gallagher’s career began at 12, when he tried out for the Delaware Children Theater’s production of “Tom Sawyer.”
“I still have his audition sheet,” says Marie Swajeski, founder of the theater. “He was trying out for any part. I had him read for various characters, but he was so exceptional with his reading, even though he had little experience, he got the lead part.”
Gallagher met Seth Kirschner while auditioning. Kirschner got the Huck Finn role.
“They had a lot in common,” says Seth’s mother, Nina, of her son and Gallagher.
They didn’t like each other at first, Seth says. “I think we were jealous of each other.”
But that changed after they began to hang out, and started singing acappella, attempting to emulate their favorite folk group, Canadian-based Moxy Frivus, whom Johnny and Joni had seen with their parents at the Philadelphia folk festival.
Their mothers, Nina and June, became friends, and even took their sons together to New York for auditions.
Nina remembers the boys writing songs together.
“After hearing what they wrote, June and I would look at each other and say, ‘OK,’” Nina says. “But they were very determined to start a singing group. And look what happened.”
What happened was “What’s Now?” a band Gallagher and Kirschner formed. It was scary how quickly Gallagher learned how to play guitar, Seth says.
“You’re so young and don’t realize what’s happening,” he says. “He learned so many songs in three months.”
They soon developed an avid local following, says Cathy Snyder.
“They had a group of little teen girls who followed them everywhere,” she says. “I told them I’d be their oldest groupie. Johnny had long hair and looked like Lennon. They were very good.”
Gallagher continued to act in musical theater, says Swajeski, who directed him in his first plays.
“After ‘Sawyer’ we did ‘Secret Garden,’” she says, “and he got the part of the invalid boy. It was a musical again, and he worked hard and did a beautiful job — for a person who said he couldn’t sing. He didn’t overact. He reacted to what was going on.”
The boys found other creative outlets.
“We stayed up all night one time at his cousin’s house and made up an entire language all on our own,” Seth says.
In between throwing socks up at a whirling ceiling fan.
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Starring in a Broadway musical like “Spring Awakening” — an update of an 1891 German drama that traces the sexual and moral oppression of teenagers — takes both talent and patience.
To get there, Gallagher endured auditions, traveling, rejection, missing the high school experience.
“He took it very seriously,” says sister Joni. “And because of that, it seems so effortless.”
Like many actors who catch the Broadway bug, he finds live performance much more thrilling than working in either movies or television.
“One of the great things I’ve discovered about theater and a long run is it affords you so much opportunity to live in your play and get to know every inch of your character,” Gallagher says.
Television and movies are very different, he says.
“The stories often are shot out of context. In theater you get to ride as the story is supposed to be told.”
He’s done eight plays in 12 years, but only three films and a handful of television appearances.
His one guest spot on the opening episode of the fourth season of “The West Wing,” for example, involved only several minutes of acting. Still, he memorably played his character — a lovesick campaign helper — both funny and sad.
But there’s no contest when he compares that experience to the camaraderie among castmates of a play.
“I love a live audience and the ritual of theater, that we all go into it together and we all come out at the same time,” he says. “It’s very intimate.”
With his gravity-defying shock of hair, Gallagher is on stage for about two-thirds of the 2-hour, 15-minute rock musical. As Moritz, an angst-ridden teen at the center of the play, he sings two songs by himself, and several more in ensemble pieces. (To hear him sing, go to www.springawakening.com).
One of his solo songs, “The Bitch of Living,” is thrilling to hear, says Cathy Snyder.
“It’s the bitch of living/ (ah, ah, ah)/ With nothing going on,” Gallagher sings to a thumping beat, jumping up and down on chairs. “(Nothing going on)/ Just the bitch of living/ Asking: what went wrong?/ Do they think we want this?/ Oh — who knows?”
“It’s amazing when Johnny goes into the zone,” Snyder says. “These kids aren’t playing a part, they just are that person. Johnny wasn’t there anymore. He’s just Moritz.”
For the past few weeks, Gallagher also has been riding a hectic schedule since his Tony nomination was announced, and has appeared at galas, benefits and TV shows. He was featured in an article in last Sunday’s New York Times as a charming novice in the middle of the New York award-season grind.
Not bad for a young man who never even finished Brandywine High School.
While a senior, he dropped out to perform in “Kimberly Akimbo” in New York City.
“One of these days I’ll get that GED just to have it,” he says.
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Gallagher misses Wilmington suburbia.
The name of his band, “Old Springs Pike,” is an amalgamation of the suburban and rural roads of his teen years, Old Kennett Road, Concord Pike and Cold Springs Drive.
“I love New York, but I miss the quietude of a suburban area,” Gallagher says. “I love being able to open the window and not hear anything. I like to drive around the suburbs with the window down. That was how I was brought up.”
He lives in a piece of Wilmington suburbia: Ten people from the Wilmington region live within a 10-minute walk of each other in Astoria, all of them trying to make it in the big city.
Kirschner also seems to be on his way: He will be a featured actor next year in “Lipstick Jungle,” a network television series pilot about three high-powered New York City women, starring Brooke Shields.
No matter how much Gallagher misses suburbia, however, New York has as powerful a draw on him.
“New York is so much a part of me now, it would be a hard day for me to leave it,” he says.
That’s because of the nature and speed of his success.
“There are nights when you’re really tired, but we have this really great music and energetic vibe,” he says.
“When you’re on stage, you’re free from any negativity and exhaustion. It’s a moving train and you have to get on to it.”