Onetime bar manager has lowdown on theater stars
League City lured Gregory Purish from the bright lights of Broadway, but anticipating the June 12 telecast of this year’s Tony Awards reminds him of colorful characters he met on the Great White Way.
Hugh Jackman, Patti LuPone and Jim Belushi were among the household names who performed in Shubert Theaters during the nine years that Purish managed the bars at the Shuberts’ 18 playhouses on Broadway.
“I was never star-struck,” said Purish, explaining why the handling of celebrity egos often fell to him. ‘Do your own makeup’
“The current formula for success on Broadway is ‘revival with a movie star;’ so we would get a movie star who was used to traveling with an entourage,” Purish said. “I would be the one who had to go to their dressing room and say, ‘Do your own makeup.’ ”
He saw some Hollywood actors who were fired because, accustomed to doing multiple takes for a camera, they couldn’t learn their lines.
“Movie stars aren’t theater folk,” Purish said, echoing a sentiment in last year’s Oscar-winning movie “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).” It starred Michael Keaton as a former actionmovie hero who tried to redeem his acting career by slumming in a Broadway play.
Purish dished on how Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth “hated each other” when playing husband and wife in the 2010 musical “The Addams Family” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Ironically, audiences voted them Favorite Onstage Pair in a popularity poll.
“They both had huge egos,” said Purish. “She saw that he had more songs than she did; so they had to bring back the writer and the composer to give her another song so they would have the same number. At the curtain call, they entered from separate sides of the stage, they wouldn’t hold hands, they never spoke.”
Purish remembers Australian star Hugh Jackman as being especially kind to everyone involved in his Broadway shows, including “The Boy from Oz” at the Imperial Theatre. Jackman won a Tony Award in 2004, hosted the ceremony in 2003, 2004 and 2005 and was surprised with a Special Tony Award in 2012 for raising millions of dollars for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
“He would send his assistant to buy a couple of thousand dollars in scratch-off lottery tickets and walk around the theater to give 10 or 15 of them to every usher, every bartender, every porter,” Purish said. “He knew everybody’s name and their boyfriends’ or girlfriends’ names, from the toilet scrubber to the house manager.”
Purish said the bar business on Broadway is “major money.”
“We would only do 45 minutes of business a night at each bar, from 7:30 to 8, then 15 minutes at intermission, but we made $100,000 a week for ‘Mamma Mia,’ ” he said.
With another show, the 2011 limited run of “Kathy Griffin Wants a Tony,” Purish said, “The bar made more money than ticket sales.”
Rent was high, too, with Purish paying $3,700 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.
When his sister, Rebecca Olbrys, and her husband retired to League City, Purish saw that, compared to what he paid in Manhattan, “their mortgage was small change for a palace; so down I came.”
Purish, who is 46 and single, “fell in love” with Houston’s Bay Area.
The New Jersey native now works 21 days on and 21 days off as camp boss on a 1,000-foot drillship in the Gulf of Coast.
Purish described his role aboard ship as “the equivalent of Leona Helmsley,” the infamous New York hotel manager.
“The ship has 190 hands; every one of them is a food critic and a diva,” said Purish. “The job sucks, but it pays extremely well and I get six months a year off, so it’s a win/ win.”