Jack’s back

Jack Gallagher returns to the B Street Theatre on Tuesday with another limited two-week run of his still-new one-man show, Just the Guy.

Just the Guy opened the B Street’s Second Stage (more affectionately known as “B-2”) in July. The B Street’s producing artistic director, Buck Busfield, commissioned the piece from Gallagher, who lives in the Sacramento area, to dedicate the long-awaited new performance space.

The autobiographical show sandwiches episodes describing the blue-collar jobs Gallagher worked in his youth—a gritty job making hot-dipped anodized nails comes in for particular attention—with a narrative about how Gallagher almost made it big in prime-time television. During the 1990s, Gallagher parleyed the recognition and acclaim accorded to his very successful show about fatherhood (Letters to Declan, which enjoyed two runs at the B Street) into a contract to develop a TV series.

It’s a funny but cautionary tale, as Gallagher contrasts the hands-on, plain-spoken ethic he internalized as a working-class boy of Irish background growing up on the East Coast against the slippery social practices of Hollywood, where deals are done (and undone) amidst hollow praise and artificial smiles, and a writer/comedian’s carefully nurtured project can suddenly disappear down the garbage chute for less-than-logical reasons entirely beyond his control.

The show got good marks on its first go-round—this reviewer rated it “Well Done.” After the initial run closed on July 17, Gallagher took a four-week vacation and went—where else?—Back East. As he takes up Just the Guy again, there will be some changes.

“I was pretty happy with it,” Gallagher said while on vacation last week. “The changes are more a matter of me finding the areas that work the best, and then trying to expand on them without expanding past the point of being interesting or funny.”

The four-week break has given Gallagher “a little distance” from a script that occupied his attention for most of this year. He started writing it in January, and worked on it five or six hours a day until the day it opened, July 5. “Because it took so long, and I worked on it so exclusively,” Gallagher recalled of that period in his life, “I didn’t bring anything with me on vacation. So when I go back, I will approach it with a really fresh eye, and maybe some of the changes will come after I look at it.”

Gallagher said that even though the show is scripted, “I don’t ever do it the same way twice, which kind of drove [director] Buck Busfield and [stage manager] Jerry Montoya crazy. I’d think of something and go off on a tangent, and they’d be flipping back and forth in the script looking for where I was.” The urge stems in no small part of Gallagher’s background as a stand-up comedian, working clubs and appearing on The Tonight Show and others.

Gallagher saw a contrast between the way he wrote Letters to Declan and Just the Guy. “Letters was the first time I had written anything,” he said. And the show evolved over a period of time. “With Just the Guy, I had more of an idea [where I was going], though I wouldn’t consider myself to be more than an advanced novice [writer]. But I had a better idea of how to mix the sad stuff with the happy stuff. And I knew I was trying to get the ‘male thing’ to go with the ‘Hollywood thing,’ and have them met up at the end.”