Today we’d like to introduce you to John Fico
Hi John, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
After a trip to the Empire State Building in the First Grade, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a New Yorker. I wanted to be inside all that excitement and bustle and rush with the tall buildings and the beautiful Rockettes and the zodiac lit up on the ceiling in Grand Central. I wanted to eat hot dogs and pretzels from street vendors and ride the subway to wherever I wanted to go and to whoever I wanted to be. A few years later, I went with our grammar school glee club to see the spring musical at a local high school. After watching those kids sing and dance in their fantastic costumes, after hearing the thunderous applause, suddenly I knew what I wanted to do when I got to New York City. I wanted to be an actor.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
A smooth road? No — I’ve been fortunate in many ways and also faced hard times. The hardest thing was that when I arrived in NYC after college, the business wasn’t what my professors said it would be. There were no casting directors and agents ready to open their office doors to new talent. In fact, due to the hordes of hungry actors and rising crime, their doors were locked! So although I couldn’t get an audition for a good paying job without an agent, I did regularly self-submit for and was cast in lots of showcases, thinking I could invite agents to come see me onstage. In my first ten years of showcases guess how many invited agents showed up to see me — or anyone else in those casts…none! Not one. The reason should have been obvious but wasn’t to me — most showcases at the time were terrible and agents already had lots of unemployed clients. Most of the plays I was in were worse than terrible anyway. Good training but disheartening. Eventually, though, I found myself at an open call that was underattended and I actually got seen for a paying job – – something I had usually been unable to do — remember what I said about the hungry hordes? With that job (two children’s shows in rep) I went on my first tour. I began to learn how the business worked and to rebuild the confidence I had lost since college. I was a very slow learner, but I didn’t give up.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Although I have recently branched out into TV and commercials, I have mostly performed in theatre — musicals, dramas, comedy, and even toured for years as a puppeteer. I specialize in multi-role tracks that require different physicalities and voices for each character. I am perhaps best known for the solo play Made For Each Other, a four-character play written for me by Monica Bauer that I have performed in theatres and festivals from the West Coast to the UK’s Edinburg Fringe, off and on since 2010. If there is anything that sets me apart it’s how my puppetry experience can inform my work as a kinesthetic stage performer which is how I developed the characters in Made for Each Other, with the guidance of our brilliant director John D. FitzGibbon.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
I can find something like it in a hot cup of coffee or a long walk down a beautiful street but I usually find real happiness in other people. Drinks with friends, bumping into old co-workers, rehearsing with a new cast, coaching others through their auditions, listening to an audience breathe when the curtain rises, coming home to my husband when the day is over — it’s other people always. Even though I often feel like there are too many people here in NYC (and they are apparently all walking right in front of me everywhere I go!) other people are all we have in the world. They’re are the best part of being onstage — all those people with you under the lights and even more seated out in the dark, all of us together.
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Main photo by Matthew Murphy
additional photos
1 – by Andrea Phox
2 – by Ellis Gaskell
3 – from my website
4 – by John Fico