DALLAS — Dallas actor Brian Gonzales has come down with COVID three different times. Unable to work, like thousands of actors across the country — indeed, around the world — he lived in his in-laws’ house in Garland and made deliveries for Uber Eats for more than a year.
So, where is he now? Broadway.
Now 48, Gonzales has a starring role alongside Billy Crystal in "Mr. Saturday Night," which is nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best New Musical. And on Sunday night, Gonzales will appear onstage with Crystal and other cast members in the Tony Awards telecast on CBS. The broadcast begins at 8 p.m. ET, where all of his friends can see him. Heck, maybe even some of his Uber Eats customers will recognize him and do a double-take.
“It is,” he says, from his friend’s apartment, where he’s staying near the Nederlander Theatre in Manhattan, “a hell of a way to come back from the pandemic.”
Ah, yes, the pandemic.
“Two years ago, possibly as little as a year and a half ago, I was still sitting there, going, ‘OK, do I have to find something else to do with my life? Is this what we’ve come to?’ ”
When the national emergency began on March 13, 2020, interrupting his role in the Broadway hit "Aladdin," in which he’d thrived as Babkak since 2014, “There were those of us still hoping it would be only a matter of months. No one wanted to hear from the people who were saying, ‘Oh, honey, it’s going to be years.’ "
But years it was. Two, to be exact. Broadway went dark in early 2020. Gonzales was bereft of any theatrical work until "Mr. Saturday Night" opened on the Great White Way on April 27.
“And so now, we’re feeling an element of, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re back!’ And we’re doing a show we’re proud of and we enjoy. Folks in the theater community are emotional creatures. And so, there were times during the pandemic that it saddened me to see some theater folks, over a difference of opinion, or how things were handled, turn on each other.”
Leaving him with the chilling fear: “Can we recover from this?”
The agony of missing work, spiced with internal politics was “more than a little scary. But at the end of it, when it was time, I’d see people coming together, finally, to get us back on our feet, doing what we love to do.”
Gonzales says he and his wife, actress and director Ashley Puckett Gonzales, “feel so grateful” for Shane Peterman, the producing artistic director at WaterTower Theatre in Addison, for letting them teach at his acting studio. Ashley recently directed "The Odd Couple" at WaterTower.
Unemployment payments kept them going through much of 2020, but starting in 2021, Gonzales took on the role of Uber Eats delivery man.
“I had a lot of low points,” he says. “I allowed myself to get angry and sad about a lot of things. When Ashley gets upset or worried, she gets sad. When I get upset or worried? I get angry.”
It is so much better now, and yet, even with a showy full-time gig on Broadway, COVID still lurks as a menacing threat. The cast is “vaccinated and boosted” and tested “three times a week,” he says, but just before the show took a one-week hiatus after a matinee and evening performance on May 28, Crystal tested positive for COVID.
Even so, when Gonzales and the legendary comedian appear together on national television on Sunday night, it should feel in no small way like sublime vindication. No one, Peterman says, is more deserving.
“Brian is a great guy. And he’s a gentleman. He’s also an adult,” he adds with a knowing laugh. “He’s a wonderful husband and a really wonderful father.”
Theatrical soulmates
Now 44, Ashley Puckett Gonzales met her husband when both were doing shows at Garland Civic Theatre. Brian’s mother was directing the show, "Hans Christian Andersen," “and Brian was stage-managing,” provoking what Ashley calls “an enormous crush.”
She was 15. They began dating four years later and have now been married for 20. As with other couples, they have not been immune from trials and tribulations, just one of which was the economic strife slammed into overdrive by the lockdown.
“Brian the person,” she says, “is unfailingly kind and loyal. Super grumpy. And very intelligent. And very funny. Like the funniest guy I know. Incredibly quick-witted. And you couldn’t have a better guy in your corner. I hit the husband lottery.”
Their first child, Gideon, was stillborn, on Oct. 19, 2010. They later launched a foundation, Gideon’s Feet.
“Gideon’s footprints in my life were so powerful,” Ashley says. “And I want his footprints to be that powerful in the lives of others.”
On Sept. 12, 2012, Ashley gave birth to Simon, whom she describes as “the greatest! He is not neurotypical. He has sensory processing disorder,” which she calls “a pretty major sensory disorder. Very mild autism and some OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder]. He does life a little different, but he’s incredibly creative. Simon just did his first show [at Peterman’s acting studio]. He did "Shrek," and I directed. Brian toured as Shrek, so it’s a special show to us as a family.”
Peterman says his son and Simon share in common their neurodiversity. “I have learned so much from Brian, just in the way he interacts with Simon. Brian is so compassionate. And in that way alone, I see him as nothing less than a role model.”
Ashley the director calls it a human touch, which in her view has heightened her husband’s success. It’s ironic that the Tony Awards share the spotlight in June with the finals of the National Basketball Association, where role players and support personnel determine success or failure as tellingly as superstars.
As an actor, she says, he’s “effortless. Somewhat irreverent. And also, very much driven to make the story good. He does not have an ego involved. He’s happy for other people to shine. Happy to be a team player.”
Those who have seen "Mr. Saturday Night" marvel not only at how funny Gonzales is but also at how beautifully he sings. Which isn’t surprising to Peterman, who has known him since the 1990s. Gonzales played the lead in "One Man, Two Guvnors" at WaterTower and served as James Corden’s understudy during the Broadway production, replacing him twice.
“Brian is such a multifaceted performer,” Peterman says, “from his singing to his acting. He’s got impeccable comedic timing. He’s an old-school Broadway performer in the sense that he can blend in and do it all.”
Years ago, Ashley says, during an audition for "Into the Woods," “The director said, ‘Brian, act like an opera singer.’ And this enormous voice came out!”
His theatrical redux
Gonzales contends that there is no better show for his theatrical redux than "Mr. Saturday Night," which first appeared as a movie in 1992. Crystal wrote the screenplay with Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, the same trio now nominated for a Tony, for Best Book of a Musical.
Set in New York in the 1990s, the late 1940s and early 1950s, "Mr. Saturday Night" covers the rise and fall of stand-up comedian Buddy Young Jr., played, of course, by Crystal. But unlike the movie, the Broadway show is a musical.
“We as a cast pick up on the fact that this is an emotional and very personal thing for Billy,” Gonzales says. “Billy loves this guy. Billy loves this character. And he’d always felt that there was more, much more, for Buddy to say.”
Buddy Young Jr. is a throwback to such old-time comics as Buddy Hackett and Don Rickles, who, like so many, got their start in the nightclubs of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, where, during postwar America, Jewish families spent their summers.
Crystal, Gonzales says, is “very generous. And wants you to be funny as well. He wants you to have great moments. If he’s on you about a line or a joke, it’s because he wants you to have the best moment possible. He calls the cast his family, which is so lovely of him. And yet, there’s anxiety, because we have to step up to Billy Crystal, who is truly in a league of his own. He’s fantastic. He’s funny and has more energy than all of us put together, no matter what our age.”
Gonzales plays no fewer than five characters in the show and serves as an understudy for veteran actor David Paymer, who was nominated for an Oscar for the same role he played in the movie version of "Mr. Saturday Night."
Gonzales describes his own Crystalline moment as “getting to elevate good old-fashioned comedy and feel-good theater, at a time when we need it the most. I’m not knocking the more substantial or social commentary shows. They have their place. But I think there are also a lot of folks who need to get out and have a great night — right now.”
Born at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, Gonzales grew up as the only child of parents whose vocations and passions fueled an early ease with being comfortable in the spotlight.
Mama sang the blues
His mother, Mary Lou Gonzales, worked as a blues singer on the riverwalk in San Antonio, appearing with such talents as B.W. Stevenson, Todd Rundgren and Janis Joplin “before she was Janis Joplin.”
He spent his childhood living in various corners of Mesquite, Pleasant Grove and Garland. His father, Gilbert Gonzales, was “a TV guy,” who worked for WFAA-TV, in the news department and on such classic shows as "Mr. Peppermint." Gonzales still takes pride in the fact that, when famous anchorman Peter Jennings came to town, he requested to have Brian’s dad as his crew chief.
Gonzales graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He later went to the University of Texas at Austin but stopped short of graduating. The theatrical bug had already bitten.
“I’ve been a showbiz kid all my life,” he says. “Theater has always been an escape for me. It was actually my way of getting away from the chores of real life. I would say to myself, ‘At least I’m being paid, and it’s my job to live in a fantasy land — here.’ I loved the escape of it. I loved the creativity of it. I loved being able to escape into someone else. That’s always been a joy for me. I love the pretending.”
COVID robbed him of the pretending for a while. But now, he’s back.
Theater has endowed him with lifelong friends and a soulmate, but he also loves it “because it brings me so much closer to comedy. I love comedy. If you can get an audience to laugh and stop the scene, there’s no better feeling.”
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