Galluccio (photo: Ricky Tozzi)
The elephant in the roomPlaywright and producer Steve Galluccio takes Quebec and Canadian theatre 39 steps forward, and no steps back
by Richard Burnett
It is one of the world’s most popular plays of the last decade, premiering in the U.K. in 2005 to rave reviews before moving on to Broadway in 2008 where it won a couple of Tony Awards. But I suspect some folks in Quebec’s and English Canada’s theatre communities wish nothing but ill on the new upcoming Montreal French-language adaptation of The 39 Steps, a farce adapted from the 1915 spy novel by John Buchan and the 1935 film by Alfred Hitchcock.
That’s because playwright, screenwriter and producer Steve Galluccio – along with his 39 Steps production partners, film producer Denise Robert (wife of director Denys Arcand) and Pierre Marchand – have evidently coughed up a good chunk of their own cash (probably in the tens of thousands of dollars) to produce Les 39 marches without one penny of government money. In Quebec and Canadian theatre so dependent on government cash, this is revolutionary (and Mirvish in Toronto doesn’t really count because they only bring in already-established and often Broadway-bound productions).
