Paul Gallo

Paul Gallo, born February 24, 1953, in New York City, is an American theatrical lighting designer whose Broadway career spans more than four decades and encompasses over 52 productions. He grew up near Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, the son of Albert Gallo and Lola (Morales) Gallo, who worked as ballroom dancers during the 1950s. Gallo enrolled at Ithaca College on an acting scholarship before discovering a stronger aptitude for lighting design. He subsequently pursued graduate study at the Yale School of Drama, where he earned his MFA and trained under lighting designer Tom Skelton and set designer Ming Cho Lee.

Gallo made his Broadway debut at age 27 with Passione, starring Jerry Stiller. In the decades that followed, he accumulated a body of work that places him among only nine lighting designers to have designed more than 52 Broadway productions. His original Broadway productions include Grown Ups (1981), Beyond Therapy (1982), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), The House of Blue Leaves (1986), Smile (1986), City of Angels (1989), Lend Me a Tenor (1989), Six Degrees of Separation (1990), I Hate Hamlet (1991), Crazy for You (1992), Show Boat (1994), Smokey Joe's Cafe (1995), Titanic (1997), Triumph of Love (1997), The Civil War (1999), Three Days of Rain (2006), A Bronx Tale (2007), Mauritius (2007), November (2008), Wonderland (2011), and Three Tall Women (2018).

Gallo has also designed lighting for a substantial number of Broadway revivals, among them Anything Goes (1987), Guys and Dolls (1992), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1996), The Sound of Music (1998), The Rocky Horror Show (2000), 42nd Street (2001), Man of La Mancha (2002), The Crucible (2002), and Pal Joey (2008).

His work has earned eight Tony Award nominations for Best Lighting Design, for The House of Blue Leaves (1986), Anything Goes (1988), City of Angels (1990), Crazy for You (1992), Guys and Dolls (1992), 42nd Street (2001), The Crucible (2002), and Three Days of Rain (2006). The Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design has recognized his work ten times, and he won that award for the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls. In 1986, Gallo received the Henry Hewes Design Award for Collaborative Design Achievement in Lighting Design for the Public Theater production of Vienna: Lusthaus, and he received a Hewes nomination for Lighting Design for The Crucible in 2002.

Beyond the stage, Gallo has worked in film and television. His screen credits include the films O.C. and Stiggs (1985), The Comedy of Errors (1987), The Man Who Came to Dinner (2000), and Chicago (2002), as well as episodes eight and nine of season three of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2019).