What right had I to be the next Jesus Christ?
I was a mere 23 years old. I was raised not in Nazareth but in the small, provincial city of London, Ontario. I was a gay man in a time when it was still far from acceptable to be publicly out. I had never graduated from high school, let alone college, having dropped out at age 16 after flunking ninth grade. I had been living for half my life with type 1 diabetes, the kind that requires daily injections of insulin. And I had been raised Jewish. Yes, I know, Jesus, too, was Jewish, but he was not of the bagel-eating, garment-business tribe to which my family belonged.
I looked around the room I was in — the concert hall inside the old Masonic Temple on Yonge Street in Toronto. It was March 25, 1972. I was one of hundreds of hopefuls who had come to audition for the Toronto production of Godspell. The show, a musical based on the Gospel of Matthew, had opened a year earlier in New York and become an Off Broadway smash. There were already new productions underway in Melbourne, Australia, and London — as in the big London, over in England, not the population-250,000 city I was from. Further Godspell productions were soon to open in Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
There was no show hotter, and its premise — that Jesus and his disciples are young hippie clowns in face paint and thrift-shop clothes who relate their parables via catchy folk-rock songs — was irresistible to seemingly every performer under the age of 25 in greater Toronto. About 75 percent of the auditioners, me included, were wearing bib overalls. I knew no one there except Andrea Martin, a petite, dark-haired girl from Maine who, for whatever reason, was living in Toronto and always seemed to be auditioning for the same shows as me. When her name was called, Andrea sold the hell out of a risqué song called “Somebody” from an obscure show titled Celebration that began, “At 20, man, you’ve had it, if you know what I mean/ And you start aging very fast, the day you reach 13.”
I recognized, but did not know, a brassy comic actress named Jayne Eastwood. She had been a cast member of The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, a short-lived variety show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that was meant to be our country’s answer to Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. I had worked with Lorne Michaels, the Lorne in Hart and Lorne, on another of his attempts to break through in comedy, a 1969 CBC pilot called “The Students Are Coming.” I liked Lorne a lot; he was a fellow Jewish Canadian, a few years my senior, who also had grand designs for a show-business career. But neither of us was exactly going places at that point.
One young woman at the auditions made quite an impression. Taking the stage in pigtails and the requisite overalls, she sang the Disney song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” in a goofy, guileless way more appropriate, in my judgment, to an elementary-school assembly than a professional audition. She may as well have sung “I’m a Little Teapot.” But what did I know? The show’s composer, Stephen Schwartz, and director, Howard Sponseller, seemed utterly taken with this tall, skinny girl, whose name was Gilda Radner. They also clearly loved Martin Short, an adorable little guy in a newsboy cap. He chose an incredibly unhip song for his audition, the Rodgers and Hart standard “My Funny Valentine.” But as soon as we heard him sing, “You make me smiiiile with my heart,” Marty had us all in the palm of his hand.
I was not, in general, a nervous auditioner. To me, auditions were just another opportunity to do what I had wanted to do since childhood: perform for other people. I had walked into the Masonic Temple confident that I had the stuff to win the part of Jesus. I had a few factors working in my favor. Because I had been out on the road for a job, I had been excused from the first round of auditions; this was the callback round. At the very least, I would experience one less excruciatingly stressful day of awaiting the creative team’s verdict.
Secondly, the reason I had been on the road was that I had been part of a traveling revue known as Canadian Rock Theatre, which leaned heavily on songs from Godspell and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar. The problem was, the producers who put our revue together never bothered to get permission for us to perform the Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar songs. Our tour ground to an ignominious halt when we received a cease-and-desist letter from these shows’ justifiably pissed-off composers. Nonetheless, my monthslong participation in this debacle had given me an advantage: My big showcase in Canadian Rock Theatre was “Save the People,” the first song Jesus sings in Godspell. I was the only auditioner at the Masonic Temple whose audition song came from the show he was auditioning for.
One other big thing, quite literally, in my favor: my hair. It had been, from early childhood onward, naturally curly. But growing up as I did in the 1950s, it was cut too short for my curls to be conspicuous. By the mid-’60s, when I was a teenager and finally had agency over how I looked, Beatlemania was in full swing. I went to great effort — styling products, netting, blow-drying — to straighten my hair into a Paul McCartney pageboy. But as the ’60s neared their end, a more anything-goes ethos took effect. On a whim, I decided one day in 1969 to stop straightening my hair and let it grow out. The result was a glorious bloom of light-brown curls with blond highlights.
On some days, I accented this look with a beaded Indian-style headband for a groovy mushroom-cloud effect. I had been a chubby little boy and consequently had never been confident in my physical appearance. But as I finally reached puberty and shot up in height, my delicate facial features — an inheritance from my beautiful mother — became more prominent. Between my seraphic face and my newly natural, God-given halo of hair, I had become, if not a handsome young man, a very pretty boy.
“Next, Victor Garber,” someone finally shouted over the PA system.
Well, here goes. I took my place onstage, standing before the footlights with my Martin acoustic. Then I began to sing:
When wilt thou save the people?
Oh God of mercy, when?
Not kings and lords, but nations
Not thrones and crowns, but men
As I sang, I registered the room going quiet. I noticed people in the audience smiling and mouthing the word “Wow.” After I sang my final line — “God save the pee-ee-ople,” hitting a higher note in the final syllable than was written in the score — the group rose as one in a standing ovation. What? I had never before experienced one. Feeling grateful, bashful, and rather triumphant, I wandered off into the wings. As I did, the PA system issued a call for “Eugene LEE-vee.”
A guy with a thick mustache, even thicker eyebrows, and wildly untamed dark hair gingerly approached the stage, feeling his way as if he was blind. I was later told by Eugene Levy, whose last name actually rhymes with “heavy,” that in his trepidation about following me, he had decided at the last second to remove his eyeglasses, in order to look more youthful and cool. His insecurity was misplaced. Eugene had a winning presence and a lovely singing voice — you can hear it in “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” the duet he sings with Catherine O’Hara in the movie A Mighty Wind — which he put to good use on the song “Aquarius” from Hair.
Little by little as the day went on, the ranks of us still in the running grew thinner. When it was all over, after Stephen Schwartz and Howie Sponseller had made their choices, there were ten of us left. I was in as Jesus, praise be. Joining me were Eugene, Gilda, Jayne, and Marty. Also selected were Gerry Salsberg, Rudy Webb, Valda Aviks, and Avril Chown. Paul Shaffer, who was there that day to accompany two female friends on piano, had so impressed Stephen with his ability to play nearly any song on demand — this, though he couldn’t read music — that he, too, was asked to stay on, as the production’s pianist and musical director.
Andrea was dismissed. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand how they could pass on someone with such undeniable star quality. She walked out, devastated.
Marty and Eugene, who were both from Hamilton, Ontario, were already friends with each other and with Andrea. They shared my distress. A couple of weeks into rehearsals, it became evident that another woman chosen for the company wasn’t working out and needed to be replaced. Howie happened to be throwing a party for the cast that night. Eugene, in an act of magnanimity so characteristic of who he was and still is, called Andrea and said, “Come with us to the party. And be funny.” At the party, Andrea effectively reauditioned for Howie, shticking it up as if her life depended on it. Howie swiftly recognized the error of his ways, and before the night was over, she, too, was in the Toronto cast of Godspell.
I still think a lot about that party. I remember scanning the room and thinking to myself, This is not a normal group of people. I had done several plays and TV shows by that point, so I had met my share of gifted, funny actors. I also knew myself to be capable of being funny onstage. But this gang was a level of funny beyond anything I had ever seen — so smart, so inventive, so adept at rapid-fire comedic Ping-Pong. Plus they were all, to a person, even the non-Canadians like Andrea and Gilda, so nice. It was an instant lovefest, a brand-new set of best friends. Then and there, I recognized that my life was about to change.
The best of these best friends, at first, was Gilda. She had arrived in Toronto from her native Detroit fully formed, the exact same woman the entire U.S. would fall in love with a few years later on Saturday Night Live. I was utterly enchanted by Gilda. She had no inhibitions about playing an idiot or deliberately making herself look unattractive onstage, yet she was also capable of being stunningly sexy. Marty Short likes to say that every man wanted to be Gilda’s boyfriend and every woman wanted to be her best friend. The problem was that the man Gilda wanted to be her boyfriend was … me.
Once rehearsals began, we started getting paid, $160 a week — a princely sum in those days. With money in our pockets, Gilda and I started going out for dinners at a chic restaurant in the Windsor Arms Hotel called Three Small Rooms. These outings looked and felt like dates, and Gilda was affectionate and tactile — her intentions toward me were clear. But while it would have pleased both our sets of bourgeois Jewish parents for us to become a couple, that simply wasn’t going to happen. It took Gilda a beat to figure out what was up, but when she did, she was gracious and our friendship continued unaffected. Soon thereafter, she pursued the significantly less gay Marty, with whom she enjoyed a torrid romance.
I must confess that at first, I didn’t really get the show. On paper, the script didn’t seem that funny, and the looseness of it all — the clowning, the lack of a traditional plot structure — seemed kind of slapdash. Godspell had taken a circuitous path to the big time. It began as a student production at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. A student there named John-Michael Tebelak wrote the book for the show as his master’s thesis, with original songs provided by his friends. The play caught the attention of the New York producer Edgar Lansbury, who, with his partners, brought Godspell to the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. Stephen Schwartz, another alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, was conscripted to write a new set of songs. After the retooled show became a hit at the Cherry Lane, it transferred to the Promenade Theatre, a bigger Off Broadway house on the Upper West Side, and birthed all of the out-of-town productions.
Back then, I was what you might call a musical-theater classicist, raised on my mother’s original cast recordings of South Pacific and Gypsy. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim — those guys wrote proper musicals. Godspell struck me as … not my thing. That is, until I saw our cast bring it to life. Stephen Schwartz maintains that ours was the funniest production of Godspell he has ever seen, with everyone milking the material for whatever laughs they could find.
Jesus, though he is dressed in a Superman shirt, clip-on suspenders, striped pants, and clown shoes with pom-poms on them, is effectively the show’s straight man. In one scene, he professes to be able to read people’s feet the way fortune tellers read palms. I examined Marty’s foot and proclaimed, “It says, ‘Rejoice!’” Marty, surveying the sole of his shoe quizzically, deadpanned, “It says, ‘P.F. Flyers.’” On paper, a lot of these jokes were vaudeville groaners, but in the hands of the future cast members of Saturday Night Live and SCTV, they landed big.
Marty couldn’t resist trying to break me even during my crucifixion. Every night, after Jesus died on the cross, my apostles gently helped me down from the chain-link fence to which I had been lashed. Then they would bear my limp, lifeless body aloft and carry me up the center aisle through the audience to end the show. It was meant to be a moving, cathartic experience for all involved. Except that Marty, when the time came for the cast to lift me, liked to whisper in my ear, “Okay, Moose, let’s go.” Sometimes he would go further, pretending to groan as he hoisted me up, adding, “Ooh, Papa’s gained a little weight, has he?” And thus, though it was not in the script, Jesus smiled as He exited the theater.
Opening night at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, on June 1, 1972, was euphoric. The audience bought in from the moment Gerry Salsberg entered as John the Baptist, blowing his shofar and singing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” We got laughs of a magnitude we never anticipated and tears of both joy and sorrow. We received standing ovations, several of them, over the course of the show.
The following morning we received a rave from the Globe and Mail, with the reviewer singling me out: “Singing, cavorting, admonishing the other kids, driving the message home with humor and simplicity, Garber is as impressive as he is ingratiating.” In the days and weeks to come, we “kids” would discover that we had become celebrities in Toronto, our comings and goings chronicled in newspaper gossip columns.
I did not know it, but attending the show that very first night was David Greene, a filmmaker who had been hired by Columbia Pictures to direct a movie version of Godspell. We were all aware that the movie was in the works, to be shot that summer on location in New York. But it wasn’t foremost in our minds. New York? Hollywood studios? Major motion pictures? These were way beyond the ambitions of your average Canadian actor.
A few days into our show’s run, I learned — from, of all places, a newspaper article — that I was under consideration to play Jesus in the film. No one had bothered to tell me directly. But when I contacted my agent, she told me the rumors were true: Of all the Jesuses in all the productions of Godspell, I was the Jesus who Greene wanted for the movie.
Bear in mind that I was, at that moment, working my dream job. I had spent several years scuffling: acting in regional productions, playing sets in pass-the-hat folkie bars, and touring with a vocal quartet called the Sugar Shoppe that was briefly successful but ultimately fizzled out. I was at long last where I had always wanted to be: at the center of a hit show. Plus I was working with the most talented people I had ever met, who also happened to be my dearest friends. Put simply, I did not want to leave. “Heartbroken” is not too strong a word for how I felt. But what was I supposed to do? Turn down a studio-financed movie for which I had been handpicked to play the lead?
The idea of leaving my friends caused me tremendous guilt. I had spent over two months rehearsing with them and bonding with them. Would they think I was abandoning ship? Who would take over as Jesus? And what about Muffin, the stray cat I had adopted? Who would look after her?
Of course, I realized that there was no option but to do the movie. Not because of the money — I would only be paid scale, like all the other actors. It was because I would be a fool not to. Had any other member of our cast been in my shoes, they would have taken the job without hesitation.
Gilda and Marty took me out for drinks one night to drive home this point. We drunkenly stumbled upon one of those photo booths where, for the price of a dollar, you could take four pictures. We did a bunch of goofy poses and the machine spat out a photo strip. Gilda was always schlepping huge bags of miscellaneous stuff with her — snacks for the cast, lozenges, her knitting — and from one of these bags she fished out a Magic Marker, with which she wrote over my face, I DON’T CARE, I GOT THE MOVIE. We then ran over to the Royal Alex, shuttered for the night, where Gilda insisted upon taping the photo strip to the cast picture on the theater’s façade.
I imposed upon myself the responsibility of finding someone to replace me. I knew just the guy: a New York actor named Don Scardino. Two years earlier, I’d had a small part in a Canadian film he was the star of, Homer, and I knew he had the sensibility and sensitivity to play Jesus. Plus Don could really sing. While shooting the film, we bonded as fellow folkies and started playing and singing together as a duo. We even considered making a record. (There is an alternate universe in which Godspell never happened and the duo of Scardino & Garber is still out there on the cruise-ship circuit, singing their soft-rock oldies to their fellow baby-boomers.) Don was excited about this idea, and I managed to persuade Edgar Lansbury, our lead producer, to meet with him. As I expected, Don was offered the part of Jesus without so much as an audition — the only Godspell actor ever granted this privilege. I spent my final week in Toronto performing by night and tutoring Don by day, putting him through Jesus boot camp. Then, after a mere month’s worth of performances with this fabulous cast, I took my final bow. Gilda agreed to take in Muffin, and I headed south to New York.
I was the last person to be cast in the Godspell movie. I went from the warm embrace of my Toronto peers to a rehearsal room full of strangers who looked upon me as an outsider. Six of the film’s cast — David Haskell, Robin Lamont, Gilmer McCormick, Joanne Jonas, Katie Hanley, and Jeff Mylett — were from the New York production, and if that wasn’t intimidating enough, two of them, David and Robin, went all the way back to the original Carnegie Mellon production.
David Greene, our director, was an eccentric Englishman with a donnish sweep of hair and a gray goatee. He had radically reimagined the show’s setting for the film. Whereas the stage musical was deliberately stripped down — little more than a three-sided chain-link enclosure with various props hung upon it — the movie would be shot on location in New York, mostly outdoors, in places like Central Park, Lincoln Center, and the roof of the still-incomplete World Trade Center.
The premise of the Godspell movie is that it takes place during a wrinkle in time. The film opens upon a typical grumpy New York day, with traffic snarling the streets and horns honking. Yet a few people are divinely ordained to be plucked from the everyday grind, among them a waitress (Katie), a cab driver (Jeff), an aspiring actress (Gilmer), and a grad student (Lynne Thigpen, from the Washington, D.C., production). They discover themselves to be uniquely attuned to a frequency where they can hear the summons of David Haskell’s John the Baptist as he sings “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” Converging at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, they cast aside their workaday worries and submit to a collective baptism.
Then Jesus appears and leads them through a joyful summer day of parables and prayer, in a New York City otherwise devoid of people. The story must still end where it ends — with Jesus’s crucifixion by Judas (also David Haskell) — but as his disciples carry his dead body around a Park Avenue corner and disappear out of frame, the city returns to fully populated “normal” life, only with a noticeably more upbeat vibe among the people on the streets.
The rehearsals were intense, with a ton of new choreography and a crash course in how movies are made, since every single one of us in the cast was making our major-film debut. At first, I felt disoriented. I was missing out on all the fun in Toronto, where Don was thriving as my replacement. Then Gilda called me with some bad news: A rogue storm window had crashed down on one of Muffin’s forepaws, requiring the amputation of a leg. Cats are remarkably adaptable creatures, and you’ll be pleased to know that Muffin went on to enjoy a happy three-legged life in Gilda’s care. But this moment of feline crisis did little to alleviate my homesickness.
Over time, however, I earned the trust and friendship of the movie’s cast, growing particularly close to Katie, Lynne, Gilmer, and Jeff. I also acclimated to New York City. I rented a little place on Bleecker Street and drank my coffee at the same café every morning, thanking my lucky stars that I was living in Greenwich Village! I was certain I had found the place I’d always been destined to call home, and the West Village is where I live today.
I learned pretty quickly that I did not enjoy the filmmaking process. Give me the immediacy of theater any day. Films are shot out of sequence and are full of long, tedious days of stop-start action. We worked a lot of Sundays and early mornings in order to preserve the illusion of an empty city. David Greene was a bravura visualist, using expensive helicopter shots to capture us running through Central Park’s Sheep Meadow and dancing atop one of the World Trade Center towers.
We had to climb the final four stories of the unfinished tower, since the elevators did not yet reach the top. The roof was pitched and we were surrounded by cranes and other heavy equipment. When I see how close to the edge we were during “All for the Best,” the song we shot there, I’m amazed that only one member of our cast was terrified enough to want out. Jerry Sroka, our Eugene Levy analog in the film, begged off from the scene and was replaced by a double, Paul Kreppel, another alum of the Off Broadway Godspell cast.
For the same sequence, David Haskell and I performed a vaudevillian top-hat-and-cane duet on a support platform above the Accutron by Bulova sign in Times Square (“World famous for tuning fork accuracy”). We did this in front of silhouetted moving images of us dancing on the 50-foot-high lighted billboard. This was cutting-edge computer technology at the time, and it took a lot of work to get the prefilmed billboard versions of us to sync to the real us.
David, not unlike Jerry, was afraid of falling and white-knuckled his way through. Not me, though. Growing up in faraway Canada, I had always found Times Square romantic and intriguing when I glimpsed it in movies and TV shows, and I had logged the Accutron sign in my head alongside the famous ones for Camel cigarettes and Coca-Cola. To dance atop it in a movie? I was gobsmacked.
The only thing I truly feared was my baptism scene, in which Jesus materializes for the first time in the movie, wearing only gym shorts. If I was self-conscious about showing my body in the stage musical, I was mortified to be shirtless on film, outdoors and in the Bethesda Fountain, no less. Watching the scene now, the 70-something version of me curses that young man for not realizing that he was more than acceptable — let’s settle on “cute.”
No one ever told me during principal photography that the dialogue we were speaking was unusable. Due to all the ambient noise collected by the microphones in the outdoor scenes, every spoken word in the film would need to be dubbed in postproduction. In the industry, this is called looping or ADR, automated dialogue replacement. Fortunately, I learned that I had an aptitude for looping, which was a relief in more ways than one. When I watched the first rough cut, I was not happy with my performance. As a newcomer to film, I was wary of coming off as stagy and overly expressive. So I held back a bit, which resulted in — to me, anyway — a flat, disappointing performance. But looping allowed me to plug some of that withheld emotion and nuance back in: a real-life lesson in movie magic.
My looping prowess had another salutary effect. It led to a fairly lucrative side gig dubbing foreign films into English, back when American movie distributors thought that this was a better idea than using subtitles. (It is not.) In the ’70s, I dubbed two of Gérard Depardieu’s movies, one of them the Best Foreign Film Oscar winner Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. I also dubbed Michel Serrault in La Cage Aux Folles. The English dialogue for these films was often absurd and barely coherent, written to conform to the movements of the actors’ mouths. But I managed to make it work.
Godspell opened in March 1973 to pretty good reviews and disappointing box office. It was overshadowed completely by the film adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar, directed by my countryman Norman Jewison and released a few months after our film, to big crowds and grosses. Having recently watched our film for the first time in decades, I can see why it didn’t set the world alight. The stage is a better delivery system for a modular show of parables than a film. There is no compelling plotline to give the movie momentum, and there are slack moments when the set pieces simply don’t work. This wasn’t the funny Godspell of Toronto but an earnest expression of early-’70s youthful utopianism. But when the musical numbers work — as in “Save the People” and “Beautiful City,” a new song that Stephen Schwartz wrote especially for the film — the movie soars. What I see is a group of talented young people who committed themselves completely to the material, to moving effect.
For this reason, the movie has proven to have a long tail; it’s held in much higher regard than it was in the 1970s. Today it is shown with regularity in religious schools, and has a fervent following among theater kids. I still receive lots of fan mail about it — up there in frequency with the letters I get about Titanic, Alias, and my two excursions into the DC Comics Universe, The Flash and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. People ascribe a benevolent power to Godspell, saying it has helped them get through tough times and awakened their faith.
I feel it was my destiny to play Jesus in the movie. I don’t mean to sound messianic or grandiose. It’s just that I realized, first through Canadian Rock Theatre and then through two different iterations of Godspell, that I believed everything I was saying in character. Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. You are the light of the world. I felt comfortable being the person imparting these words.
This is not to say that Godspell turned me into a Christian. I am too skeptical of organized western religion and its many corrupt leaders. Nor am I an observant Jew, despite my many long hours spent in Hebrew school. The closest I have to a “good book” is Autobiography of a Yogi by the Indian-born spiritual leader Paramahansa Yogananda, which introduced me to an entirely different approach to spirituality.
But I do believe in a higher power and in radical empathy. The way that things broke for me — the Zeitgeist of the time in which I came up, the way I looked, the way I sang, the emergence of this wondrous show, the extraordinary people I worked with and befriended — seems like more than a fluke.