The general public knew Roger Rees best for his television roles as Robin Colcord in “Cheers” and Lord John Marbury in “The West Wing.” But the Welsh-born actor, who died on July 10 at the age of 71, was, at heart, a theater animal. That lifelong commitment to the stage will be acknowledged on July 15 when the lights of the Broadway theaters will be dimmed in his honor.Rees lit up the stage with his radiant talent, most notably in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s epic 1981 production of “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” for which he won the Tony Award. He was nominated twice more, in a 1995 revival of Jean Cocteau’s “Indiscretions,” opposite Jude Law and Kathleen Turner, and once again as co-director with Alex Timbers of the wildly inventive “Peter and the Starcatcher.” His last appearance on Broadway was two months ago in the musical “The Visit,” opposite Chita Rivera.I’d had the privilege of meeting Rees in early 1975, six years before his star turn in “Nicholas Nickleby,” when he made his Broadway debut in the RSC’s production of Dion Boucicault’s “London Assurance.” I was a callow reporter at After Dark Magazine and he was one of my first interviews when we met on a wintry night at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, the Monk’s Inn, where the waiters were dressed in habits and cowls.Then all of thirty, with a thick dark mane of hair setting off his handsome features, Rees was idealistic, charming and, to this inexperienced reporter, very English in his elegant three-piece suit and crisp white shirt. When our waiter accidentally stained that shirt while pouring a bottle of wine, Rees was all apologies as if though it was his fault. After the young man departed, the actor quipped, “I suppose you could get defrocked for that.”Self-deprecating and modest, Rees spoke of the theater as a refuge from an isolated and lonely boyhood in which he found himself hard-pressed to join in the activities of his school mates. So it was a boon when this son of a policeman was chosen to sing a solo — “Once in Royal David’s City” — at the Christmas service at Southwark Cathedral. But as the boy watched the throngs filing into the church, he turned on his heels and ran away, leaving a frantic choirmaster to find a substitute. “I wanted to do it so much that somehow I felt compelled to flee,” he recalled then. “Sounds strange, doesn’t it?”A couple of decades later, Rees was performing with the RSC in “The Taming of the Shrew” in Japan when an earthquake struck and the audience fled the theater in panic. The actors remained rooted on stage. “Since none of us had ever been in an earthquake before, we didn’t know quite what to do,” he said. “So we just continued playing the scene. After the initial shock, the audience came filing back in.”By that time, Rees had become so enamored of the stage that wild horses, much less an earthquake, couldn’t have pried him from it. But it had not been easy. He was an aspiring painter, then enrolled in London’s Slade School of Art, when his father died suddenly and he dropped out to care for his family. He took odd jobs, including spending one Christmas waist-deep in mud helping to build the Victoria line underground. It was while Rees was painting scenery for Arthur Lane, one of the last of the great British actor-managers, that the impresario induced him to make his stage debut in Stanley Houghton’s “Hindle Wakes.” He’d found a home. “There’s something very fine and lucid and rich in this tradition of the English actor,” he said. “A richness of observation and character that you find in Rembrandt paintings and Bruegel crowd scenes and I’m terribly grateful to Arthur that I was able to share in some part of it.”Auditions for the RSC followed, five of them before he was finally admitted. The first one was a disaster. “They said my voice was terrible, nervous, and spotty and that I must go away and learn how to use it properly,” said Rees. “I must admit I was rather agape since I had never thought about making my voice better. I thought acting was just going on and remembering all of one’s lines.”Though it would be several years later that Rees would return to the United States, eventually making it his home and taking citizenship, he then expressed an admiration for the American theater. “There’s a tough, gritty professionalism that is very impressive…that intense pressure to achieve, to be professional,” he said. “On the other hand, the English tend to applaud a certain kind of amateurishness. The loser, the fool, is embraced in England because there is a recognition of silliness there that allows a person to keep his ambitions and desires at a certain distance. Just being in the race is enough.”Rees then expressed the desire to safeguard that “silliness” within himself — “the ability to let go of things that one prizes very much with out a sense of loss.” He then lifted the sleeve of his black suit jacket to reveal a bright yellow cat collar. “I wear this to remind me.” When the conversation turned to his personal life, Rees said that he been nearly married twice and now lived in his London home with neighbors upstairs and a girlfriend and cat downstairs. If he hadn’t found the right girl it is probably because seven years after our interview he would find the right boy, a handsome young writer, Rick Elice, who would become his husband. For the next thirty years, they’d be one of Broadway’s most popular, devoted, and successful couples. They’d collaborate on a mystery, “Double Double,” before Elice would go on to co-write “Jersey Boys” and “The Addams Family” with Marshall Brickman. Rees would take on the role of Gomez in the latter and then the two would collaborate once more on “Peter and the Starcatcher” to much acclaim. That brilliant future lay well ahead of the actor when we practically closed down the Monk’s Inn on that winter night. The waiters had taken off their habits by then and were shooting glances in our direction when Rees opened his arms expansively and said, “Oh, I want to do so much! I really don’t approve of people going off to islands. I suppose I have this relenting Christian image of coping with all the hassles and obstacles of daily life with taxi strikes and fuel shortages, disappointments and heartaches, taking up your cross to bear and setting out like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim to accomplish what you have to do.”Roger Rees, May 5, 1944—July 10, 2015. Well done, pilgrim, and farewell.
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