Who's Your Daddy?
In the beginning, when Johnny O'Callaghan first walked on to the stage at the Victory Theater Center as the solo performer of Who's Your Daddy?, I immediately felt apprehension about watching this lone man for two acts. But as his true tale enfolded, he tugged at my heartstrings and I became more and more engrossed in him, his humane effort and what he went through to adopt a young boy from Uganda.
I suppose you could call this young Irish lad a misfit, unemployed (at the time) and a user of drugs. When his partner leaves him, he is devastated. Soon after, he is invited by a friend to help him to film conditions at an orphanage in Uganda and he figures why not. In his play, written by O'Callaghan and directed by Tom Ormeny, he details the poverty, filth, diseases, and retched conditions he finds in that country, and in particular, the orphanage where he happens upon a three-year-old boy with whom he falls in love with at first sight.
Johnny never had any thoughts of becoming a father, but what hit him changed his life forever. He decided to adopt the boy, never realizing what obstacles he would be facing in order to do so. But this young man was so transformed that nothing was going to stop him from his objective. Going through a nine-month period of making it happen is detailed in this play and performed with such sincerity as to make one fall in love with the boy he named Odin (after the Norse God) and to have great respect for Johnny O'Callaghan.
The Victory Theatre Center is located at 3326 W. Victory Blvd. in Burbank. Who's Your Daddy? plays Fridays and Saturday at 8 PM, Sundays at 4 PM, through December 18. Tickets and further information are available by calling (818) 841-5422, or online at www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org.