His memory may be spotty going back over a half-century, but Broadway veteran Victor Garber remembers his breakout role as Jesus in the quirky 1972 Toronto staging of Godspell as a life-changing experience.
“It was lightening in a bottle. It was clear to everyone that we were all in sync. It was undeniable. We didn’t know what we had, of course, except we knew it was working,” Garber told The Hollywood Reporter on Friday after Nick Davis’ documentary You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution opened the Whistler Film Festival.
The Toronto run for the iconic hippie musical launched the careers of Garber and fellow cast members Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, Jayne Eastwood and others.
The 1972 staging, which brought the successful off-Broadway production of Godspell to Toronto, ran from May to September that year and led to Hollywood careers for cast members with SCTV and Saturday Night Live, and movie credits like Three Amigos and Best in Show and TV series like Schitt’s Creek and Only Murders in the Building. The Toronto Godspell show’s musical director, Paul Shaffer, went on be Dave Letterman’s musical director on The Late Show.
Garber reached for superlatives when asked to explain how the off-Broadway Godspell run in Toronto reached the creative heights it did to launch a generation of legendary comedy icons. “It’s magic. There’s no explanation for it, other than it was serendipity. We don’t know how it happens, or why it happens. That’s kind of what it was like. It was a magical thing,” he explained.
“There’s no logical explanation, other than that’s what happened. It’s like when you meet someone you love. It’s explicable,” Garber added. For the Canadian-born actor, of course, Garber’s Godspell performance at the Royal Alexander Theatre in Toronto led him to his New York stage debut as Jesus in the musical and the 1973 Godspell movie adaptation.
Other Broadway performances for Garber followed, including for Hello, Dolly!, Damn Yankees, Arcadia, Noises Off and Sweeney Todd. And that fulfilled his dream to get to Broadway he’d had from age 11 when his mother took her young son to a Toronto production of West Side Story at the then O’Keefe Centre.
“I sat there and I’d never seen anything like it. I knew this is where I belonged. I could feel it in every fiber of my being. I knew from a very early age,” he recounted.
At age 16, Garber dropped out of high school to forge the only career he’d ever wanted, and with his talent and training cinched his audition to play Jesus in the Toronto staging of Godspell.
“Everybody wanted to be in Godspell. I had been touring the country singing the songs, so I had a leg up to get that role,” he recalled. Garber remembered hitting his marks while singing “God Save the People” at the audition, and by the end of the day, after callbacks, had earned the role. “It meant the world to me. I felt so connected to that material,” he recalled.
Eventually, Garber also went on to film credits like Argo, Milk, Titanic, Legally Blonde, The First Wives Club and Sleepless in Seattle, and TV roles that include playing Jack Bristow on Alias, Dr. Martin Stein/Firestorm on DC Comics’ Legends of Tomorrow and four seasons of Family Law shot in Vancouver.
The You Had to Be Here doc, a Canada-U.S. coproduction, had a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in Sept. 2025 and opened the Whistler Film Festival.
