“Play Him once more, Sam” started on the Broadway stage in 1969, with Mr. Roberts, Mr. Allen and G -Ja Keaton (and Jerry Lacey just like the Spirit of Humphrey Bogart), everybody performs the roles they are going to play in a film. Regardless of the critiques of the weak reward, the present has been operating for greater than a 12 months and Mr. Roberts acquired a nomination for the Tony Award for Finest Participant within the play.
He had already been nominated for Tony the earlier 12 months, for the most effective actor in a musical, for his efficiency in “How Now, Dow Jones.” The Instances of Instances hated the present, a Wall Avenue Romance Music Comedy, however liked Mr. Roberts, whom he described as a “bundle of abilities” with “aggressively intact terrier face and eyebrows with impartial suspension.”
It was an enchancment to what one other Instances critic, Walter Kerr, had advised Roberts a extra outward efficiency in “Don’t drink the water” (1966), a comedy for the son of an envoy with critical habits issues. It was the primary cooperation of G -n Roberts with G -N -Alan wrote it. “Barely partaking,” Mr. Kerr shrugged.
The scene was a welcoming dwelling for Mr. Roberts, a decade after a decade. There was London, the place he participated with Betty Buckley within the music “Guarantees, Guarantees” (1969). There was a regional theater the place he appeared on Follies (1998) on the Play Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. And there was BroadwayThe place he took about two dozen roles, largely comedian and musical.
He was praised as “Urbanic Silly” by Mr. Barnes when he performed a cell architect in Alan Aikburn’s comedy Absurd Individual Singular (1974). He was a theatrical critic within the revival of Arsen and Outdated Lace from 1986 and a retired physician from the Higher Western nation and an annoying noble husband in “The Story of the Spouse of Charles Bush Allergonist” (2000). Ben Brantley of the Instances, this play, known as the Roberts “Resonance Professional in Resonance.”
Within the early Roberts, he was accused of stockbroke in commerce within the inside aspect in “pairs” (1985), a comic book drama for disaster of midnight life at a tennis membership in Connecticut. Dipping deeply into the drama, he performed the compassionate Dr. Dorn in Chekhov’s Seagull (1992).
