Frank Joseph Galati was born on November 29, 1943 in Highland Park, Illinois, north of Chicago. His father, also called Frank, was a dog trainer and boarder, and his mother, Virginia (Cassel) Galati, was a sales clerk at Marshall Field, the department store.
He grew up in Northbrook, Illinois, and enrolled at Northwestern, where one of his earliest communications came from appearing in a talent show for teachers and students in 1964.
“A native comedian, Frank Galati of Northbrook, a junior in the school of speech, appeared eight times,” wrote The Chicago Tribune. “In one, he portrayed a professor who spent so much time telling his class how far behind he was that he never caught up on the class schedule.”
Mr. Galati had a lifelong fascination with Gertrude Stein, which he incorporated into his theater life from the mid-1970s when he directed a reading of some of her works called ‘Have They Attacked Mary. He giggled.” – a title taken from a work by Stein. In 1976, for the Chicago Opera Theater, he directed Virgil Thomson’s “The Mother of Us All,” the libretto for which Mrs. Stein wrote.
In 1987, at the Goodman, he performed arguably his most ambitious Stein-inspired piece, “She Always Said, Pablo,” with the words of Mrs. expanded, the other an artist who changed the way we see it. Reviewing it for The Tribune, Richard Christiansen called it “a pinnacle of Galati’s work as an interpretive artist”. The production was later shown at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Mr. Galati said that he found Ms. Stein’s lyrics enchanting.
“They’re just beautiful to listen to,” he told The Tribune in 1987. “They gallop, jump, jump and ring in our ears.”