Six Questions with Bruno Giraldi

NiteLife Exchange: You are a New York-based actor and singer born in Argentina; when did you realize you have a gift and what were some of your early influences?

Bruno Giraldi: This was no gift, but a lot of work. And if it was a gift, it was a very expensive one. LOL! I always had to work hard to get the tools I needed as a performer. I have been training since I was six years old. And I continue training. I don’t complain though. I like the process as much as the result.

The answer to the second part of the question is Bette Midler and Marlon Brando. I dedicate a segment of my show to Bette Midler because she was a discontinuity in my life, a revolution. Before seeing her perform for the first time, I was not aware that a person could be capable of doing something so powerful and consequently, have an impact on other people.

As for Brando, just like him, I prefer that that aforementioned impact lead the public to reflect. For instance, when I interpret a role in a play, I don’t moralize it. I make it human—that is, good, evil, tender, disgusting…

BG: In Argentina, I did a play called The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde when I was around 13 years old. I had done a couple of presentations in the studios where I had gone to train before, but this was the first actual play I did. I was the protagonist but I didn’t have the solid resources in the Stanislavski method that my mentor Norman Briski gave me later in life. So I was just doing it for the sake of joy, which is a point we often forget, when we acquire a lot of training. And I remember that the experience was like going into a trance, because a standing ovation woke me up once the performance was over—which I wasn’t expecting at all. And of course, after that, I was hungry for more, so I did plays such as Waiting for Godot, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Filipo, among many others. But by the time I did them I already had those solid tools I mentioned, to which I was introduced when I was 17. It was a lot of work to acquire those tools. It didn’t come easy in the least.

Meanwhile, in New York, I am rarely cast for straight plays because of my accent. It happens to me that they give me a call-back and eventually they tell me things like: “Your accent is going to be an issue in this city.” But when I sing I guess it’s not so easy to notice it, so they cast me for musicals or for roles in straight plays who have an accent that is not Latin, but French, Arabic, Jewish…  like Hamman in the tragedy of Esther. I was cast in a Shakespeare show that consisted of many scenes from Shakespeare’s plays called To Be or not to Be: A Shakespearean Experience and in The Bathtub. That piece was fully in Spanish and in which I interpreted a young man going back home, after his parents abandoned him when he was a child.

BG: At the age of five I decided I was going to be an actor and a singer. And let me be clear on this note: I am an actor. I am a singer—mot an actor who sings or a singer who acts. Or a dancer who does neither! LOL! So the cabaret format is very convenient for me because it’s not musical theater for which I’m often cast and which I don’t enjoy because of it’s shallow messages and because you have to be an actor who sings, which is not organic. But in cabaret I can sing and also do monologues.

The first cabaret show I did was in 2014 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was called Chained. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I just went for it and I had a good time. So I kept working on it—polishing it. And I guess that This Is Bruno is the last version of those previous versions. Only that this time I learned from the lion tamer, Tanya Moberly, who taught me how a cabaret show should be done. So this last version was an educational experience.

BG: I prefer them not to expect much because I don’t want to disappoint them. LOL! They have to come and see it because if I tell them what to expect, I would be conditioning them. In other words, don’t expect, just come!

BG: The sources were my own experience as a foreign performer in New York, The Symposium by Plato, some ideas of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, an essay on revolution by the Argentinean author Julio Cortazar, Greek Mythology and a sad episode that occurred in Argentina in 2017 in which the former president Mauricio Macri disappeared a person called Santiago Maldonado.

The future… I’ll be interpreting Richard III in LATEA theater in June 2020 in a truer version of Shakespeare’s play called Richard, so right now I am busy studying for it.

Like any other performer, I would love This Is Bruno to go well in order to keep doing it.

Also, I’d like to be working in film, but I don’t have any project planned or going on in this area, which ironically, is the area in which I am trained the most.

BG: I try to survive.

This Is Bruno is at Don’t Tell Mama, Wednesday, January 15th & Tuesday’s, January 21st at 7:00pm

For more information and tickets click here