Jonathan Michael Gallegos
The Music That Raised Me
Club Café’s Napoleon Room, Boston, MA, April 4, 2026
Reviewed by John Amodeo
We are fortunate in Boston to have several colleges and universities with voice and performance curricula that attract great talent to Boston for their studies and who eventually stay in town. Jonathan Miguel Gallegos is one case in point.
Though he received his BA in vocal performance in his home state at New Mexico State University, he came to Boston for his Master of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre Vocal Pedagogy at Berklee School of Music (now Boston Conservatory at Berklee). After graduating, he stayed on at Berklee, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Voice as well as a Lecturer of Musical Theatre Performance at Boston University, and a Teaching Fellow of Voice and Speech at Harvard. In addition, he has his own private teaching studio.
With such a full plate, there was hardly time for his own performing. That is, until his 40th birthday, which he celebrated on April 4 by making his solo cabaret debut with his show The Music That Raised Me at Josephine’s Cabaret in the Club Café’s Napoleon Room, Boston’s leading cabaret bistro.
In his debut, Gallegos was instantly likeable. He had a strong voice that hovered comfortably between baritone and tenor and leading-man good looks that were easy on the eyes. But his strongest appeal was that he was a natural and affable storyteller. We learned about the challenges of growing up gay in New Mexico 40 years ago and that he was adopted. He shared these biographical anecdotes easily and playfully without a hint of pathos or self-pity. His coming of age came with the “gay reckoning,” followed by his hapless love life. All of this was strung beautifully together with a well-crafted set list that mined tunes from Broadway, pop, and even opera, all chosen to help tell his story. The built-in musical eclecticism made for a fascinating evening filled with wonder, curiosity, and anticipation.
He opened strong with the Celine Dion-recorded “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” (Jim Steinman), during which he revealed his fanboy Celine Dion T-shirt beneath his dress shirt. Gallegos is a sucker for a ballad (no bad thing, especially when one sings ballads as well as he does), so his Broadway selections, mostly ballads, took us on an emotional journey that traced his own. “Maybe” (Charles Strouse/Martin Charnin from Annie), sung with his adoptive parents in the front row who came all the way from Albuquerque for the show, followed his own origin story of foster care and adoption and added poignant authenticity to his earnest delivery. Then to his adoptive mother he sang “Mama, A Rainbow” (Larry Grossman/Hal Hackady from Minnie’s Boys), another moving moment that left hardly a dry eye in the house.
His more adult life, fraught with closeted repression resulting in unrequited love interests, was dramatized in Richard Rodgers’ and Lorenz Hart’s “My Funny Valentine” (Babes in Arms), a prescient choice when you realize the closeted Hart was no stranger to unrequited love himself. Gallegos put an extra lump in our collective throats with an astounding yodel octave jump into falsetto at the end of the song that heightened its emotional impact. Versatile and nimble music director/pianist Jorden Amir provided an arrangement that was truly luscious and as affecting as Gallegos’ singing. Amir, currently both a student and a music director/coach at Berklee, enriched every song with his deft arrangements that were sometimes delicate and at other times orchestral. Having already worked with leading Broadway stars, he may succumb to New York City’s seductive siren song. But let’s hope he follows in Gallegos’s footsteps and remains in Boston after graduating.
Even Gallego’s pop songs were ballads, but no one was complaining. “Chandelier” (Sia) and “End of the World” (Matt Alber) both pulled at the heart strings; both plaintively expressed the frustration of complicated romance. Gallegos was channeling his own life experience through both songs, which made them even more touching.
He showed off his classical training by including the art song “L’heure exquise” (Reynaldo Hahn) and the opera aria “L’altra notte al fondo al mare” (Arrigo Boito from Mefistofele). The latter was written for a soprano, but he sang both in his rich baritenor with impeccable phrasing and a strong emotional core. Here, he employed a generous amount of vibrato as is typically called for in such classical pieces but which was conspicuously absent from the rest of his program. Given the material to which Gallegos gravitates, employing vibrato more liberally would provide a clean finish to his dramatic belts and his soft lilting phrases.
Gallegos closed as strongly as he opened in his “Sweet Transvestite” (Richard O’Brien). His spot-on delivery left no one in doubt that he had performed the role of Frank-N-Furter in some production of The Rocky Horror Show, giving Tim Curry a run for his money. If this is how Gallegos introduced himself as a cabaret performer, then we have a lot to look forward to if he can continue to work cabaret performing into his rigorous academic life.
