Gregory Jbara Talks Billy, Celebrity and Broadway House Seat Bartering

This time last year, Gregory Jbara was just coming down (if there is such a thing) off the high induced by his first Tony Award, handed over in June 2009 for his tear-jerking turn as widower father Jackie in mega-hit Billy Elliot. He was also missing his wife, Julie, and their two young children, at home across the country in Los Angeles. In January 2010—after a year and a half with the ten-time Tony Award winning production—the leading man announced he’d be taking a break from his star vehicle. On May 4, after three months in the California sun, a dozen or so TV auditions and the addition of a new rotating roster of Billys, Jbara (a vet of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Victor/Victoria, Chicago and Damn Yankees, among others) returned to Billy Elliot for what he assures us is the long haul. Broadway.com caught up with the returning star to chat about his vacation, the secret to his success in commercials and a Tony Awards experience that’s very different from the one he had in 2009.

So you’re back from your Billy Elliot sabbatical.
And I’ve never been so happy to have a job in my life!

Why?
You spend your whole life as an actor. You finally win a Tony Award. You say, “Okay! I won an award! I’ll go back to Los Angeles and turn this award into a TV series, make a lot of money, relax and get fat.” Understand, L.A. is home for me and I’ll take any TV gig there so I can sleep in bed with my wife and be a father to my children. So I went home—and I couldn’t get arrested, let alone [cast]. It seems the projects available for 50-year-olds are not quite as abundant as we fantasize. There was so much desperation in the air [in Los Angeles] for people my age that I felt privileged to have Billy Elliot to come back to—it made it possible to sleep at night. Not to make it sound like Billy was a last resort. I felt privileged and proud to come back. When I came to see the show the Sunday before I started performing again, the production was in better shape than when I left, and that’s saying something.

What did that sobering vacation in L.A. make you think about your career?
It made me think I’ll stick with Billy until he takes me home again. Chances are I’ll do the show until it plays San Francisco in September 2011. If I can, I’ll do the run there until it moves to Los Angeles and, god willing, they’ll let me do the L.A. run so I can work from home with my family. Then, hopefully, something new will happen—some California casting director will take his family to see Billy Elliot and think, “Oh, hey, how about Greg Jbara for that new show of ours?” [Laughs.] But the upside of playing a dad is, unlike our age-appropriate stars, I can’t grow out of my role. I’ll play Jackie until my cardiologist says I have to stop!

Last we spoke you were all over primetime TV in commercials for the Olive Garden and the prescription drug Caduet. What will our favorite ad-man be selling next?
The folks at Olive Garden were nice enough to extend my contract another two years, so you’ll have to watch me, this time with a daughter, during collegiate basketball season—which makes me, and my accountant, very happy. I’m also still the voice of the John Hancock commercials. And I’m in the background of a Viva paper towel commercial as part of a five-man intervention group trying to get people off their addiction to quilted paper towels and onto Viva. We don’t say a word. It’s a great gig—I don’t have to remember any lines, get to play with paper towels all day and then someone gives you money.

You put yourself through school doing ad work and are still going strong. What’s the Jbara secret to landing a national commercial gig?
You really want to know the trick? Having access to Broadway house seats. Seriously. You need to be in a hit Broadway show.

Um…?
I kid you not. I’ve gotten most TV commercial jobs because casting directors want to book an actor who can get their out-of-town clients good house seats to a hit Broadway show while they’re here working. There’s a million guys who can do what I do in those TV spots. I firmly believe I end up in the final mix because I can get house seats to Billy Elliot. It’s been like that my whole Broadway career. The hardest part about moving to L.A. was losing the Broadway house seat bartering tool—I was expected to land the jobs based on talent.

It should be noted that that was a totally sincere answer.
Dead serious. I believe it’s bartering! And just for general info, someone online recently commented how “sad” it was that my career’s gotten to the point where I have to do commercials to get by. That cracked me up, because I realized people have no idea. They don’t know how much money we get paid to do those commercials—they literally feed our children, pay our bills and, if you’re lucky, then some. The reality is that I was making a living doing commercials long before I ever had a part on Broadway. I love commercials. Thank god for them.

You seem so completely un-Los Angeles. How are you not a full-time New Yorker?
I’ve said this since I moved out West with my wife almost 15 years ago—I miss New York City every waking moment I’m away. There’s a lot that’s great about L.A.: My kids are in a great school, my wife’s a California girl so she’s at home there, half my immediate family is out there. The weather never sucks, so it feels like a permanent vacation. But eventually you start going, “Really? Not even a thunderstorm? Come on!” My wife and I still miss things like Dell’Anima, this amazing Italian bistro near Hudson Street, where they’ve always got at least a dozen white wines corked and on ice on the bar. We can go there anytime late night and sit at a banquette and play footsies over a nice, quiet meal, then walk all the way back home on the other end of the city. You can’t do that in Los Angeles. So it’s always good to be back.

Is playing Dad in Billy like riding a bike?
I thought it might be, but ended up with first-preview jitters all over again during that first week [performing]. Because of the amount of rotating cast members we have, this show is always rehearsing, so I insisted we not have put-in rehearsals for me when I got back. I said, “I’ve been doing this a year and a half, I have my homework and I know what I have to do, let's not make the cast suffer too.” Then I got around to doing my work and realized there [was] a lot of dust on it. I was an actor out of control, terrified. Which was pretty thrilling.

You like the terror?
Well, not the terror, no. But the excitement of not being comfortable in the routine. Example: We had a dialect session three days before my first [return] performance. I’m sitting there, script in hand, and none of the words look familiar. I mean, at all. I broke into a cold sweat. I thought, “I’m in real trouble here.” But once I got onstage and was getting visual and audio cues it all came back and spilled out just fine. But not knowing what would happen during that first night back on stage? That sort of thing is very exciting.

Is it strange playing Dad to a completely different litter of Billy-boys?
Different, but not strange. They’re all so beautifully talented and utterly unique, and very, very different from the original stars. Plus we’ve got five Billys now because we kept breaking them—two were on the injured list for weeks while I was gone due to the crazy stunts they’re doing—which means I only do one show a week with some of them, so getting to know them is a little harder. We’ve also got [original cast member and Tony Award nominee] David Bologna back in the cast as Billy’s friend Michael. Jake Evan Schwencke, who shares the role with him, is both completely original and a rock star. But in re-watching David play that role, you find yourself going, “Oh yeah. There’s a reason that kid got a Tony nomination.”

Speaking of the Tonys, you got back from L.A. just in time for the conversation about Hollywood vs. Broadway to hit a fever pitch. What’s that been like?
Hmm…how can I comment without hanging myself? [Laughs.] It was sort of amazing the faces present at the Tony Awards this year. My involvement in that first hour [Jbara co-hosted the Creative Arts portion of the ceremony with fellow Tony winner Karen Olivo] meant I saw up close how many awards they pushed into the first hour and how much the [telecast] itself is now about getting as many celebrity faces and performances on that stage as they can. When you look at the ratings for this year [which were down from last year’s ceremony], it doesn’t seem that that approach worked. I’ll be honest—I was not disappointed by wins, but by acceptance speeches from some of the “celebrities” that won. Whether it’s true or not, they didn’t sound like they cared—to not know the award you’ve just won is presented by the American Theatre Wing is kind of unacceptable. I hope the people involved in presenting the awards look at that and realize they’re maybe celebrating the wrong thing, and need to make sure they’re simply celebrating the hard work being done [on Broadway] stages. Did I hang myself?

I don’t think so.
And I should make it clear that even the label “celebrities” isn’t simple. Viola Davis could be considered a “celebrity” now, but she’s a phenomenal actress who made a career on Broadway and deserved to win as much as anyone else regardless of how familiar she is. The problem isn’t necessarily that quote unquote celebrities won—many of them earned those wins. It’s more that the landscape has changed. There’s more “Hollywood” faces at a New York event. The theater critics have been railroaded out of the Tony voting pool altogether. There’s been big changes to how, and to whom, the awards play. But I don’t know ultimately how productive that’s been.

Has observing the politics of the awards more closely made you examine your own win?
Not at all. I’m still very happy to have been a winner! And I just had so much fun being a part of that first hour this year. But it has been a learning experience. I’ve never witnessed the machinations of anything like this. The bottom line is: The economy is still lousy and you need a big draw at the box office to keep running. We’ve created the beast that is our ticket-buying audience. So we’ve got to retrain audiences to appreciate shows on their merit, not just [because of] a familiar face. We’ve got to compete with internet media and television, sure—I just don’t know if celebrating celebrity for the sake of celebrity is the way to do it.

Are we experiencing backlash now?
I don’t think the season was bad enough to cause a backlash! [Laughs.] But there’s a lot of conversation about it suddenly, which is a good thing. The heart of what is special about live theater in New York City needs to be protected. So maybe let’s stop doing an awards show that’s measured by Nielsen Ratings and just celebrate the business again. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.