I heard the news in a pre-Christmas directors’ meeting at BYU. Janielle Christensen told us in a quiet voice that Robert Peterson, the great Utah baritone and our warm enduring friend, had suffered a heart attack in the middle of a handball game in St. George and had passed away in the aftermath. 72 years of age, the reports had said. Not that old, from my current vantage point. Even the handball scenario was fitting: Bob always exercised like a determined athlete to be at his best for every role.

For us at BYU, losing Bob at Christmastime was another little symbol, for Bob was cast as The Innkeeper in our Christmas show created for presentation by the Church at historic Promised Valley Playhouse in Salt Lake City.   Written and directed by Randy Boothe, The Gift of Christmas ran several seasons and was produced by a team that also included Janielle Christensen, John Shurtleff, and me. The four of us still work together, meeting weekly at BYU. We are stunned in unison by the news of our friend’s passing.

Bob Peterson’s Innkeeper role, which opened The Gift of Christmas , was excerpted from Michael McLean’s Forgotten Carols, and Mike consulted with Randy on the writing of the show. Each successive incarnation of The Gift of Christmas was a little different, and Seven Nielsen’s set designs and lobby dressing were always magnificent. In one of the years, Randy mounted a retelling of Dickens’ Christmas Carol , with Bob Peterson at his most memorable in the Scrooge role.

Man of La Mancha

I was a star-struck California kid, creating music and conducting Broadway-styled varsity shows at Stanford when I read that Utah singer Robert Peterson had replaced Robert Goulet as Lancelot on Broadway in the first run of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot .   Hearing that Peterson was not only from Utah but a practicing Mormon gave a big boost to my sense of the possible, not unlike the dreams that would be fostered among young Mormon athletes decades later when Steve Young would quarterback the 49ers and make the Super Bowl.   Like Steve Young, the Juilliard-trained Peterson was praised by critics as an artist at the very top of his craft.

Fred Adams (Utah Shakespeare Festival) tells about taking a student group to Broadway and seeing Bob Peterson in Camelot . The next day, Sunday, they visited the Manhattan Ward and found Bob Peterson recast as the Gospel Doctrine teacher.   

A few years later, when Peterson returned to Utah to raise his family, and aligned himself with the Pioneer Memorial Theater (now Pioneer Theater Company) as artist in residence and a musical theater teacher and coach, I had also relocated to Utah.   Our paths crossed, as by then I was a music entrepreneur by day (Sound Column Productions) and a musician by night-working in the orchestra at venues such as Pioneer Memorial Theater and The Valley Music Hall.

From the 70s on Bob Peterson was a fairly frequent recording client at our Sound Column Studios, and two of his kids were also studio regulars.   Son Scott produced advertising materials with us for the Utah grocery chain where he was a young marketing executive, and daughter Terri was a delightful character actress specializing in children’s voices.   And quite often at nights, their dad would be starring onstage when I was playing bass or guitar in the pit below.

The first time Bob did Man of La Mancha at Pioneer Memorial Theater I played bass.   The second time, in an attempt to sweeten the sound of the orchestra, they called two guitarists, as specified in the original Broadway score.   I was one of the two.   Something about being exposed to the simplistic but life-affirming values of that production night after night, with Bob’s great classical diction and the endearing interplay between Bob’s Quixote and his Sancho Panza sidekick, local actor Walt Price, got through to me in a life-changing way, and Bob Peterson became a symbol of the ideals and the life view that author Cervantes had put on paper.

And then in the middle of that very successful run, word came that my Grandmother West had died in California.   She was the much-beloved matriarch of a very tight extended family, and it went without saying that each family member would drop everything to be at her funeral. Conductor James Prigmore was cooperative: as soon I found a capable sub, he said, I was as good as gone.

I started calling guitarists.

But I had forgotten what a tough show it was to play: mixed meter, complicated Flamenco-like strums, complex chords-not one guitarist at that time would step in and take it on as a sight-reading challenge.   I had to come to terms with the consequences of my choice of career, and in spite of Bob Peterson up there dreaming impossible dreams-reciting innocent values in a guilt-ridden world-I made the tough decision to keep my work-related promise, to play the show, to be the only member of my extended family to miss my grandmother’s funeral.   To this day I still feel the sadness of that choice.     

My career got lucky as the 80s began.   Among several unexpected commissions, I got the call to compose a musical with librettist Pat Davis to celebrate the opening of The Triad Center Theater.   A double thrill came with the announcement that Robert Peterson would be the male lead.   I wrote with extra energy, knowing Bob would be delivering my songs.

By the time he was cast in The Gift of Christmas , early in the 90s, it had probably been a decade since I’d last worked with him.   And so, on the way out of the theater on opening night, I said to Maisa, “Humor me. I just have to congratulate Bob.”

“He might not even remember us,” she answered, but followed me around the corner into the alley toward the stage door.

There were a couple of dozen people ahead of us, and when Bob finally came out he began to greet old friends, neighbors, family members.   But he spotted us down the line, beamed that Broadway smile, and boomed, “Ron!”   He made his way to us, gave us a hug, chatted for a moment, and returned to the other well-wishers.   What a guy, we thought.

That Kind of Guy

We lost the Fred Meyer store where we live in Utah County, so we sometimes look for hard-to-find items at a Fred Meyer location where we used to live in Salt Lake.   We’re there today, and we bump into old friends Reed and Elaine, former neighbors; arts aficionados.

“We were just talking about Robert Peterson,” Reed says. “What a loss,” adds Elaine. We agree.   She continues, “When you lived here he came to sing for our sacrament meeting one time, do you remember that?”   “Funny thing,” I remark.   “We were just talking about that, too.   I guess seeing the old neighborhood brings back memories.”

“So was it you who got him to come?”   I honestly don’t remember, and reply, “I don’t know, could have been, I guess.

  We certainly knew him.” Robert Peterson had indeed accepted an invitation to sing in our sacrament meeting.   Arriving, he was as gracious as if it had been the Tabernacle or a sold-out Broadway audience.   Watching Bob sing that day in a service capacity had been an important example to me in much the same way that seeing him teaching Sunday school in the Manhattan Ward had been important to Fred Adams and his students.       

“I couldn’t believe someone of his stature coming clear across town just to sing at a Sacrament Meeting…” continues our friend, breaking into my thoughts.

“That’s the kind of guy he was, Reed. That’s the kind of guy he was.”   And we’ll miss him-there won’t likely ever be another one quite like Robert Peterson.