The first thing you notice about Steven Gallagher is his genuine warmth.
He’s a prolific Canadian playwright, performer, and director, but those abilities in any artist would only go so far without a deep and earnest excitement for getting in a rehearsal room, putting ego aside, and making something special with others — a quality that’s propelled Gallagher through his cross-country, 30-year-plus career in the performing arts.
A love of theatre runs so deeply through Gallagher’s bones that you’d think it was a path he began to follow as soon as he could walk and talk. But for a boy who came of age on a rustic farm in Quebec and favoured sports venues over stages in high school, an eventual career in theatre was hardly a given.
“In grade eight, I got cast as Wally in Our Town, and the production was cancelled because the guy playing the Stage Manager also played basketball and during the run of the show, he had this away tournament that he had to go to,” he said in an interview with Intermission.
“There was sort of an unspoken rule after that: you couldn’t play sports and do theatre at the same time. As a closeted gay kid in the ‘70s, I felt it was more important for me to play sports.”
A high school career in track and field, hockey, and volleyball followed while a burbling passion for acting — driven in part by a love of classic Hollywood cinema — nagged at Gallagher. In spite of that, he decided to attend McGill University and complete a BSc in psychology, only appearing in one school production during that time.
That one play — a political satire called When I’m Elected — was enough to convince Gallagher to pursue a path in performance. In 1987, he auditioned for a single theatre school, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and kept the pursuit a secret, afraid of what people in his life would think if he failed.
“At that point, I was on such a different track,” he explained. “Pursuing acting was a major left turn from what was expected of me.”
He was accepted and made the journey to New York, living out of a local YMCA and working an under-the-table job at Crabtree & Evelyn for five dollars an hour while he trained.
A seven-year stint in New York followed and though a few high-profile auditions came his way, Gallagher soon realized that his lack of a green card would limit his ability to perform professionally in the United States. He moved to Toronto, got himself an agent, and booked the first three gigs he auditioned for, including a regional production of the musical Forever Plaid, which took his strong talents as an actor and singer to Vancouver for two years.
“In those seven years, I went from thinking I was going to be something in science to changing the trajectory of my life,” he said. “Luckily for me, my family was incredibly supportive. They just loved that I was doing something in the arts.”
Pursuing acting was a major left turn from what was expected of me.
Steven Gallagher
It was during Forever Plaid that Gallagher met Canadian theatre artist Robert McQueen, who served as the show’s resident director and now works as director of new musical development at Toronto’s Musical Stage Company (MSC). The two readily hit it off, and have worked together in many capacities over the past three decades, with McQueen serving in roles as director and dramaturg as Gallagher began exploring his creative voice in playwriting.
“[Steven is] incredibly rigorous and very disciplined in his practice as a writer,” McQueen said in a phone interview. “He’s also incredibly open and collaborative, so he really is — in the best way — a great theatre colleague, which is the highest compliment I could pay somebody.”
McQueen also worked closely with Gallagher while the latter was in the 2018 cohort of MSC’s development program Noteworthy, where he fostered his craft as a book writer to explore his love of musicals from a fresh angle after decades of performing in them. It’s a challenge Gallagher finds invigorating in ways that are different from writing a straight play.
“I love the transformative aspect of what can happen when people start singing on stage,” he explained. “I like the spareness of how to write a book, and how much you have to give over to the song.”
Gallagher’s deep belief in the power of collaboration and in merging artistic voices with humility and openness has proved an asset in his transition to writing musicals. During Noteworthy, Gallagher met composer Anton Lipovetsky; the pair became a strong creative duo and fast friends as they crafted a piece for Reprint, MSC’s 2019 triptych of short musicals.
Seeing strong potential in the piece, MSC commissioned Gallagher and Lipovetsky to expand it into a full-length work called Blackout: a character-driven musical set against the backdrop of the 2003 Toronto blackout. The show premiered at the High Park Amphitheatre in 2021 and was selected for New York’s prestigious NAMT Festival of New Musicals in 2022. It’s a piece Gallagher and Lipovetsky continue to develop under its original title Cygnus (a name derived from a swan-shaped constellation in the Milky Way).
“Steven’s characters are so specific and beautiful that you fall in love with them instantly,” Lipovetsky told me in an email. “He’s fiercely dedicated and rigorous as a writer, but he also brings an incredible amount of warmth and generosity that he extends to all the artists around him. Working with him makes me better in every way.”
Years before adapting his love of language into musicals, Gallagher penned a number of plays that saw successful premieres in everything from fringe festivals to seasons at professional theatre companies. This mid-career move into writing coincided with seismic life events.
“Two sort of weird things happened to me: one is that I came out when I was 30. The other was that, when I was 33, I was diagnosed with cancer,” Gallagher explained.
A four-year saga of surgeries and treatments for thyroid cancer followed, with Gallagher seeing his entire thyroid removed early on and hoping that would be the end. But a year later, a routine body scan revealed the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes near his heart, which led to open-heart surgery.
“I actually asked to postpone it so I could do a couple of summer theatre gigs I had lined up, just in case they were my last,” he said.
They thankfully weren’t. Though further aggressive treatments followed, Gallagher was officially declared cancer-free in 2000.
“Going through cancer put me in a unique position,” he said. “It’s given me the ability to be present for friends and family facing their own health battles. And in many ways, it has shaped my work.”
Going through cancer put me in a unique position. It’s given me the ability to be present for friends and family facing their own health battles. And in many ways, it has shaped my work.
Steven Gallagher
That fact is clear in Gallagher’s first play Craplicker: a fictional work about a gay man who’s pushing 30 and unable to tell his family about his sexuality. When he finds out he has cancer, he must confront the possibility that he’ll die before his family knows who he truly is.
The play was a hit at the 2010 Toronto Fringe Festival and served as an early benchmark for some of the themes that permeate Gallagher’s work to this day: loneliness, identity, mortality, and the need to connect deeply with oneself and others.
It was a deeply personal work, not unlike his subsequent solo show Stealing Sam (first staged at the 2013 Toronto Fringe in a production directed by Darcy Evans), about a middle-aged gay man who steals his best friend’s cremains to give him a proper send-off; and Memorial (which premiered at the 2013 Next Stage Theatre Festival under the direction of D. Jeremy Smith), a play Gallagher wrote at the request of a sick friend.
Another running theme in many of these early playwriting efforts is that they drew Gallagher closer to artists who have become longtime collaborators, including Mary Francis Moore, who directed Craplicker. Moore currently serves as the artistic director of Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton, the city where Gallagher now resides.
“It’s been a pleasure to watch how his career has evolved from actor to director to playwright and how he has managed to deftly weave all of the elements of his artistry into his practice,” Moore shared in an email. “His decades of experience, his curiosity, and his kindness are in demand not only here in Hamilton but also internationally, and I feel so fortunate to have him in our community.”
It was the work-from-home push of the pandemic that led Gallagher and his partner to seek out more breathing space than their Toronto condo could provide. After sifting through 50 properties, they purchased a house in Barton Village in 2022 and quickly fell for the city’s scrappy charms, from the shops to the restaurants (Gallagher is partial to Wildcat Tavern and ElderCamp). They also joined the Steel City Softball League, a 2SLGBTQIA+ team that’s the largest of its kind in Canada.
Though relocating away from the theatre mecca of Toronto might feel like a gamble for many artists, Gallagher found the change of scene in the Hammer to be nothing but beneficial to his creative practice.
“I’ve written a lot since I’ve been here,” he said. “It’s been a great move for us.”
Gallagher has also found himself in multiple artistic roles at Theatre Aquarius. He was seen onstage in the world premiere of Mark Crawford’s drag queen comedy The Gig, and his musical adaptation of Pollyanna — for which he wrote the book and lyrics, with music by Linda Barnett — hit the stage as Aquarius’ 2023 holiday production, directed by McQueen.
Next, Gallagher will be leading the charge as director for Aquarius’ production of Fully Committed, an acclaimed solo play by Becky Mode that stars Canadian comedy favourite Gavin Crawford as three dozen distinctive characters.
This isn’t Gallagher’s first rodeo with the text. Prior to the pandemic, in early 2020, he directed Fully Committed at London’s Grand Theatre, again with Crawford starring, to great success.
It’s a play that’s very much in Gallagher’s wheelhouse: joyful, funny, celebratory, communal, and not without something valuable to say beneath a wildly entertaining surface. To Gallagher, these sorts of fun and accessible works aren’t fluff. They get to the core of something real and meaningful, using laughs and lightness to express bigger ideas with generosity and humanity.
“If there’s no heart, it’s hard to connect for people,” Gallagher said. “I want people to laugh and have the best time, and leave the theatre smiling.”
In a time where it can feel challenging to get people to drop their phones or TV remotes and leave the house for a live experience, Gallagher remains a staunch believer in theatre’s enduring and singular ability to offer immediate, visceral human communion in ways you won’t get from a Netflix show or scrolling through TikTok.
“I just want people to know that theatre is still here for them. We will never go away.”
WRITTEN BY
Michael Kras
Michael Kras (he/him) is a Hamilton-based playwright, director, performer, magician, and teaching artist focused on writing new-generation stories including the Voaden Prize-winning play The Team (Essential Collective Theatre/Theatre Aquarius), No Big Deal (Roseneath Theatre), The Start Up (Theatre Aquarius/Brave New Works), finsta (Boca del Lupo), and The Year and Two of Us Back Here (Broken Soil Theatre). Michael is also an in-demand magic director and designer, currently serving as the Magic & Illusion Lead for the North American Tour of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Other magic direction credits include The Extinction Therapist (Theatre Aquarius), Franklin’s Key (Pig Iron Theatre), and A Christmas Carol (Maltz Jupiter Theatre).
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WRITTEN BY
Dahlia Katz
Dahlia Katz is a professional photographer who specializes in portraits, promotion, lifestyle, events, weddings, and the performing arts. She is also a director, dramaturg, and puppeteer.
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