Elaine Stritch believes fallen producer Garth Drabinsky will make a comeback
Posted Oct 3, 2012 9:59 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – Tony Award-winning stage and screen legend Elaine Stritch says she only has positive memories from her work with famed, fallen producer Garth Drabinsky, and she’s confident he’ll make a comeback from his legal troubles.
“I think he’ll be back any minute. What time is it?” Stritch said in a recent interview, checking her watch to emphasize her point.
“I really do. I hope, I hope.”
Stritch is among the personalities who speak about the imprisoned Canadian entertainment titan in “Show Stopper: The Theatrical Life of Garth Drabinsky,” which airs Thursday on The Movie Network. It’s also screening in Toronto movie theatres.
Directed by filmmaker Barry Avrich, the doc begins with Drabinsky’s polio-afflicted childhood in Toronto, where he studied business in university and then went to law school.
That led to a 30-year career as a tenacious showbiz entrepreneur who boldly ran a movie theatre empire and produced film and lavish theatre shows, winning many Tonys and becoming a major player on both sides of the border in the process.
As the film shows, Drabinsky also faced a soaring debt load as well as legal battles and questions over his bookkeeping, and he was ultimately forced out of both Cineplex and the now-defunct Livent Inc.
In 2009, Drabinsky and longtime partner Myron Gottlieb were convicted for fraud and forgery.
“I don’t know about him doing the wrong thing, I only know about him doing the right thing, and he did right by me,” Stritch, 87, said in an interview at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where the doc debuted.
“I don’t bail out with people like that. I stick with them until they harm me. … But he never did,” continued the actress, who plays Jack Donaghy’s mom on TV’s “30 Rock.”
“He was artistically a giant, and I want him back in the business. … I’m just hoping and praying that they let him go pretty soon.”
When that day comes, Stritch said she wants to do another show with Drabinsky, whom she first worked with on a hit 1990s revival of Hal Prince’s “Show Boat.”
“He was the best producer I’ve ever had in my life,” said Stritch, who lives in New York.
“He had an overall bigger-picture-future of said property that you were doing. He was a dynamite guy.”
Other interviewees in the doc include stage stars Chita Rivera and Diahann Carroll, former MCA Universal executives Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg, and former Cineplex Odeon chairman and CEO Allen Karp.
Drabinsky, who is seen in the film through archival interview footage, is described by some interviewees as a ruthless, egocentric salesman who was an obnoxious tyrant at times.
Stritch, however, “never saw any of that.”
“I only knew him in the ways that he treated artists,” she said. “He appreciated talent, he respected it…. I only saw Garth at his ever-loving best, you know?”
Stritch said she’s talked to Drabinsky since he’s been in prison and he sounded “like the fighter and the champion that he is.”
“I think with Garth, some day the actual truth will come out, because I think he’s a stand-up guy and a stand-up guy doesn’t lie,” said Stritch.
“There’s something at the bottom of this that’s, I don’t know, I think it’s going to be OK, and I’m rooting for him in my life, in my prayers, in my thoughts.
“I think he’s a winner and I think that’s the way it’s going to end up, and he’s going to go back in his office with his phones and his secretaries and his brilliant work that he’s capable of doing. He is a master of the theatre, he really is.”
