Four days a week, Jimmy Fallon performs for a TV audience of millions of people as the host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” But stepping onto the stage of the Hudson Theater in front of about 1,000 theatergoers made him nervous in a whole new way.
“When you have too much time to think about it, you overthink it,” Fallon said after making his Broadway debut in “All In: Comedy About Love” on Tuesday night.
“It’s exhilarating, it’s exciting and it’s exhausting,” he added, in a post-performance interview in his dressing room. “Even though I don’t really even do much.”
“All In,” short comedic segments based on stories written by Simon Rich and directed by Alex Timbers, features a rotating cast of brand-name actors who tend to hold scripts since they don’t have much time to rehearse.
Fallon, 50, who on Tuesday night shared the stage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aidy Bryant and Nick Kroll (plus a band led by the married couple the Bengsons), will only appear for eight performances. But it still amounts to his Broadway debut. Which is a big deal for a kid from Saugerties, N.Y., who grew up captivated by the Tony Awards on television — and the Milford Plaza Hotel’s “Lulla-BUY of Broadway” commercials.
In the comedy, Fallon portrays a series of characters: a pirate, a young mother, the Elephant Man. For someone with only two days of rehearsal, his delivery was noticeably deft — showcasing his comedic skill, his ability to convey character through voice or posture, and his comfort with seat-of-the-pants performing.
The audience cheered Fallon’s efforts, though admittedly some of them were already devoted acolytes. He’s moonlighting on Broadway after taping “The Tonight Show” in the afternoon, and at least one fan who had traveled from California attended both, bringing him a bouquet of flowers she bestowed at the stage door.
Yet Fallon said theater requires different muscles and is its own kind of challenge.
“Whereas my show is — we write it the day before, and then you do it, and then there’s another one tomorrow. With this, I have to do it again,” he said. “So I’m going, ‘Oh, I could have done that better. Oh, I rushed that one, I talked too fast.’ But then when you get a laugh and it lands, you go, ‘All right, I’m back. Yeah. OK, OK. Head above water. Good.”
There are also some tender moments in the play — like when he and his fellow pirate soften toward a little girl in their care — which Fallon said was “an interesting stretch for me.”
But he also said he felt at home in the world of theater, partly because stage performers often appear as guests on “Late Night,” which he hosted from 2009 to 2014, remembering in particular Patti LuPone who belted a song from “Gypsy.”
“She almost didn’t need a microphone, she was so powerful,” Fallon recalled. “I saw people crying in the audience from her performance.
“I’m friends with so much of the Broadway community,” he continued. “They’re the bartenders and servers and people who are working three jobs just to stay in the city. That’s kind of what Broadway is to me. It’s a dream.”
Fallon said he identified with that kind of singularly focused aspiration, having wanted since childhood “to be on ‘Saturday Night Live.’” A cast member from 1998 to 2004, he said that experience gave him a facility with sketch comedy that he continues to draw on as a late-night host.
Still, despite all of Fallon’s success and fame, theater proved to be its own Everest. “I never got more texts and emails in my lifetime than this,” he said. “‘I’ll see you on Wednesday,’ ‘I’m coming on Thursday,’ ‘I can’t come this week, but I wish I could.’
“Why would you tell me you can’t come?” he quipped. “Just say good luck. Or break a leg, actually.”
Fallon’s wife, Nancy Juvonen, was in the audience. “She knows how nervous I’ve been,” he said. “I’ve been reading my lines for the past month over and over again. I actually put my lines on a voice memo, and I’ve been listening to myself on Audible walking into work every day.
“How sad would that be, if someone saw me laughing at my own Audible,” he added. “‘What are you listening to?’ ‘Ack, it’s embarrassing: Myself.’”
The show, which runs through Feb. 16, will feature over the remaining weeks Annaleigh Ashford, David Cross, Tim Meadows and Hank Azaria.
After Tuesday’s curtain call, Fallon changed out of his sleek suit and went outside the stage door where fans had lined up in the cold (“We love you, Jimmy!”). He greeted them enthusiastically, showing patience in signing autographs and smiling for selfies.
It was only after committing to do the show that Fallon said he learned that the “Tonight Show” was originally recorded at the Hudson Theater, which was owned for a time by NBC. “Steve Allen, 1954, started ‘The Tonight Show’ here,” he said. “You can’t even make that up.”
This full-circle poignancy hit home on Tuesday evening, as he walked from his TV job at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to the Hudson Theater on West 44th Street for his first performance — narrating on his phone along the way.
“I just recorded myself walking to say, ‘Hey, I’m doing this. I don’t know if there are ghosts out there or angels are real, but I just wanted it to be recorded, that I’m going from ‘The Tonight Show’ to where ‘The Tonight Show’ started,” he said. “And I got here in eight minutes.”
Miranda was the first person he saw upon arriving at the theater. He was standing next to a bunch of congratulatory balloons, which had been sent by Fallon’s family (and his dog Gary). “‘Here we go. We’re on Broadway,’” Fallon recalled Miranda saying. “‘Let’s do it.’”