A More Personal Note on Robert Goulet
On a more personal note ( B-flat, I believe), I've always felt a curious and silly connection with Robert Goulet.
It comes from this.
When I was in my late teens, I was sitting in the dining room at the Charterhouse Hotel in downtown Winnipeg. Goulet sat down practically next to me. I remember that he was shorter than me and impossibly handsome. He was already a big star in Canada, but this was before the "Camelot" role that made him famous. We struck up a warm and utterly forgettable conversation. He was pleasant.
Later, I learned that he had starred in at least one show at Theatre Under The Stars in Stanley Park.
I couldn't possibly have predicted, sitting in that booth in the restaurant in Winnipeg in about 1960, that I would star in "Guys & Dolls" (1972), "The Pajama Game" ('73), "Bye, Bye Birdie" ('75), and "Oliver!" ('87), also at TUTS.
Goulet wasn't my all-time favorite singer or actor, but he had a glorious voice and sometimes, with the right song, he was unbeatable.
As well, his famous story about landing the part of Lancelot in "Camelot," opposite Julie Andrews and Richard Burton is the stuff of show biz legend.
Lerner & Lowe had exhausted all usual sources looking for the right singer/actor for this role and were so unhappy with the results, after seeing literally hundreds of men, that they were about to go to Europe to continue the search.
A very sceptical Goulet rushes down from Montreal or Toronto, picks up the sheet music for "If Ever I would Leave You," opens his throat and the rest is history.
1 comment:
Hi David,
I was a crew member for two of the shows (whole summers in fact) in which you appeared in what was in those days called "Theatre in the Park": "Guys and Dolls: and "The Pajama Game". In fact, I spent several entire summers of my teen years at Malkin Bowl. I am still friends with many of the people I worked with in those years. Quite a few of us went on to careers in the theatre, including myself.
I am sure you remember the dressing rooms in the bowels of the bowl. My only interest in those rooms was the many hundreds of signatures on the walls of all the people who appeared in shows or worked on them over the decades. Amongst those scrawled signatures was one of "Robert Goulet".
All the signatures were lost in a tragic instance of bureaucratic well-meaning in the '80s when the parks board sent someone in to repaint all the interior walls. We who spent so much of our young lives in that place were devastated at the news.
I still think of that decrepit old theatre as a crucible of learning and sanctuary for a generation of musical theatre people (onstage and backstage) that are still practicing their craft. It was my Hogwarts.
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