COLCHESTER — Lunch with Morgan Freeman. Feeding a Clydesdale. Chatting with Steven Spielberg. Hosing off a pickup truck on a blustery December morning. For farmer John Allegra, it’s all part of the job.
Allegra, who owns and operates Allegra Farm, is fresh from the New York City premiere of the Hollywood film "The Greatest Showman," which was released in the U.S. Wednesday. Along with its star Hugh Jackman, Allegra divulged he himself got a fair amount of screen time, as did his 20 horses and antique carriages that are part of his 30-acre farm on Lake Hayward Town Road.
Nearly by accident, Allegra has become the go-to source for movie industry insiders on the East Coast looking to hire horses, period carriages and drivers for big-budget films such as "The Greatest Showman," a musical that tells the story of Connecticut native P.T. Barnum, the founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus.
"I tell people, I didn’t choose it; it chose me," Allegra says of the movie industry from inside his pickup truck on the farm.
A cabinetmaker and toolmaker by trade who always had an interest in horses, he says, Allegra was living in an East Haddam house years ago with a barn on the property when he thought he should have a horse to put inside it.
"The next thing I knew, I had five horses in the backyard," he says.
Allegra also began restoring antique carriages as a hobby, and started giving carriage rides at weddings and at Mystic Seaport. It wasn’t long before the entertainment industry took notice, and Allegra, his horses and carriages were hired for small projects like television commercials. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s when Allegra got his big break, appearing as Morgan Freeman’s horse-drawn carriage driver in the 1997 film "Amistad."
Since then, Allegra and, more recently, his dog Pete, have appeared alongside actors including Jackman, David Carridine, Jennifer Lawrence and Michelle Williams in television and movies including "Kate & Leopold," "Boardwalk Empire," "Sex and the City," "Joy," and, now, "The Greatest Showman," which was filmed in Manhattan and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard from November 2016 through March 2017.
In the film, Allegra appears as Jackman’s driver, negotiating the streets of 1870s-era New York in a James Cunningham, Son & Co. Town Coach carriage, which Allegra owns and stores along with several others in a large barn on the farm.
You may also be able to spot Allegra in the film leading two of his standard breeds, Monty and Lord, who are moonlighting as a pair of zebras.
On Wednesday night, Allegra and several friends who helped him on set planned to see the movie together at Gallery Cinemas in Colchester. Allegra’s next project will be with the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City after the holiday, he says, where he and his mule will appear on stage.
But there’ll be no need for stage fright, as Allegra has appeared before in "Aida" and "La Boheme" with his charges.
"We go, and we get the job done," he says.