Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia

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Jeffrey, Robert

Actor, singer, director and producer, Robert Jeffrey was born in Winnipeg in 1934, and died in September 2004 of heart failure. As a boy, he was a chorister at St. John’s Cathedral, and appeared in a production of Amahl and the Night Visitors, and later, when his voice changed, as Lt. Cable in South Pacific at Rainbow Stage.

On scholarship with the Royal Conservatory of Music, Jeffrey moved to Toronto in 1958 and was singled out by Tyrone Guthrie in the following year for his Stratford Festival productions of HMS Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance. Both shows toured North America with stops in New York at the Phoenix Theatre. In 1962 Guthrie’s Gilbert & Sullivan productions moved overseas to open with a Royal Command Performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London.

Between Stratford productions, the young actor appeared in a Julian Slade musical, The Duenna, or the Gay Chaperone, which opened at Toronto’s Crest Theatre in January 1961.

In 1967 Jeffrey performed in the Canadian Opera Company’s Toronto and Montreal productions of Louis Riel and The Luck of Ginger Coffey, directed by Geiger Torel.

In 1968 he appeared for the first time at Toronto’s new Bayview Theatre in Your Own Thing and toured coast to coast in the next two productions of Canada’s long established revue Spring Thaw.

The centrepiece of his career at this time was the new Canadian production of the New York hit Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. This show toured in Canada and opened the Studio Theatre in Ottawa’s new National Arts Centre. Jeffrey was involved with the Brel material for most of the next decade, as performer or director or producer. He appeared at a Brel salute in honour of the visiting composer at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1972. His longest run was at Boston’s Charles Playhouse where critic Jon Lehman found that he “exerted that subtle sense of strength, of timing, of leadership that pulls a show together and keeps it moving.”

During the 1970s Jeffrey was active in Toronto’s cabaret scene, opening a newly renovated Old Angelo’s with a revue devised with Ron Ror and composer Doug Randle, Of Moon and June and Honeymoon and Countless Plastic Things. After a successful Toronto run, the show opened the Studio Theatre in the new Hamilton Place, and, according to artistic director Michael Ayoub, launched a musical tradition at the new Muskoka Summer Theatre in Gravenhurst, Ontario: “Robert was the seed resulting in two decades of indigenous musical theatre for which we are most proud.”

Moon and June was followed by James Saar’s Flicks and Roderick Cook’s One More Time in Toronto and tryouts of new musicals Eight to the Bar, and Robin For Good in Muskoka.

Jeffrey returned to Winnipeg’s Rainbow Stage in Finian’s Rainbow with Bert Wheeler, and Mame with Libby Morris. He appeared in a Porter Revue with Roma Hearne for Y.H. Lui in Vancouver; and in the 1973 production of Three Penny Opera with the newly established Sudbury Theatre Centre, where he went on to a series of productions under the direction of Sudbury’s Tony Lloyd, including Oliver and Showboat.

Jeffrey retired from the stage in 1991. His last touring show was Gordon Pinsent’s A Gift to Last, followed by a Toronto production of Amahl and the Night Visitors. The Menotti opera that marked his first stage appearance also marked his last.

In later years, Jeffrey continued to appear in cameo film roles and was an executive producer of the television show Reach For The Top.

Profile by Paul Russell

Last updated 2013-01-20