By Hal Drucker

Toronto, you really, really like Richard Thomas, star of the current touring production of 12 Angry Men.
And he loves you right back.
It was announced earlier this spring that the play would return to Toronto for a second stint at the Princess of Wales theatre, where the play ran in January and February.
Thomas recently explained why he’s coming back.
“Audiences really embraced our show while we were  in Toronto. So when the opportunity to come back at the end of our  tour arose, there was no question. We are looking forward to returning to  Toronto; it's such a great city; I've been here many times.”
The last city on the tour was supposed to be Charlotte, explained Randy Alldread, manager of  public relations for Mirvish Productions. “The entire company was polled and unanimously agreed because they had had such a great time here, audiences embraced the show and of course the reviews were stellar across the board.”
During a previous interview with this writer, Thomas had explained how Toronto audiences had stood out.
“I’m amazed at the Canadian response to this play,” Richard Thomas said during the first run of 12 Angry Men at the Princess of Wales. “The audiences have been incredibly enthusiastic, not laid back and reserved as I expected them to be. There are intelligent audiences in other big markets who are not particularly vocal or demonstrative but these people are.
“A lot of them have seen the movie version, but more people than I expected haven’t. We love to have people who don’t know how it’s going to turn out. The title sells itself. It’s a beloved show and a great story.  The people who know it anticipate having a great time. Those who don’t know it are hooked by it.”
I had previously chatted with Thomas three years ago, as he was about to embark on the 12 Angry Men tour. He was impressed that I had not only seen the movie version with Henry Fonda in the role he was about to assume, but that I had viewed the original live, one-hour TV version by Reginald Rose on Studio One in September 1954, with Robert Cummings as juror number 8.
Thomas had been on a roll, appearing successively in such critically acclaimed plays as  Terence McNally’s The Stendhal Syndrome, Michael Frayn’s Democracy,  William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Richard Greenberg’s  A Naked Girl on the Appian Way.
(Though one could argue that his whole career has been one big roll.)
When Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, approached him to tour 12 Angry Men after a successful revival in New York, Thomas recognized it was very chancy.
“This business of touring straight plays coming out of New York, as opposed to musicals that have been staples on the road, because of economic reasons, was inordinately risky.  It’s a vindication of Todd’s foresight.  We were gratified because the play has been an unprecedented success.
“We played in trunk theatre towns like Atlanta that hadn’t had a straight play in 20 years, and Birmingham, Ala. that never had a straight play. They were starved for it and loved it. They told us, ‘we now want a play every season for our subscription audiences.’ It was very gratifying and a vindication for Todd’s idea to tour the play. It did so well they asked me to re-up for a second year. It was so challenging and so much fun and you didn’t want to scuttle the production by saying I’m not coming back.”
I have vivid memories of Dore Schary’s 1958 play Sunrise at Campobello in which the character John, the youngest child of Franklin Roosevelt (played by Ralph Bellamy) and Eleanor Roosevelt (Mary Fickett), was portrayed by seven-year-old Richard Thomas. In effect that was his original John-Boy role.
“That was the beginning for me,” Thomas acknowledged. “When you’re a child actor, you have different relationships with people than you do as an adult. Ralph Bellamy was unfailingly friendly and kind to me. He’d have a big bowl of lemon drops in his dressing room for me. It was also the first Broadway role for James Earl Jones, who played the Roosevelts’ ‘house boy,’ and who affectionately referred to me by my full given name, Richard Earl Thomas.”
Though he had no formal classical training, Thomas’s scholarship and erudition are such that to sit down and discuss stagecraft with him is a treat for anyone with an even superficial familiarity of theatre. He recalls his first Shakespearean role. “My first Shakespeare experience was in 1964 as one of the princes in Richard III in a Stratford, Connecticut production. I was 13 and it was  the 400th birthday of the Bard of Avon.”
I interjected, “I know you’ve played Richard III, Richard II, Hamlet, Angelo and Puck. Now, let’s talk about that role-of-roles – John-Boy.”
“I was in my third year at Columbia University in New York, starting out as an English major, but in 1969 it was very hard to get any work done in the English department of many of these universities when campus disruptions were endemic. So I switched my credits to what was then called the Oriental Studies Department in which I studied Chinese.  I had made a small movie in 1971 called Red Sky at Morning, which had Richard Crenna and Claire Bloom in the cast, for Universal in 1971. Earl Hamner was ready to do Homecoming, based on his book, as a two-hour TV Christmas special, with Patricia Neal and Andrew Duggan as Olivia and John Walton and Edgar Bergen as Grandpa Walton. Hamner had seen Red Sky and said, ‘I want him.’
“They offered me the part of this young, aspiring writer, in the Christmas special, and when it went to series, I continued in the role of John-Boy, with Ralph Waite and Michael Learned as the parents and Will Geer as the Grandpa. It ran from 1974 to 1981.”
Born in 1951 and raised in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Richard Earl Thomas’s DNA for the performing arts comes from two prominent parents, Richard Thomas, Sr. and Barbara Fallis, dancers for George Balanchine’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and other companies. “Mother was a soloist for American Ballet Theater for many years before she went to Cuba to dance with Alicia Alonso. She and Dad were co-directors of the New York School of Ballet.
 “One of the reasons my wife Georgiana and I moved back to New York five years ago, after 30 years in LA, was to be close to the theatre so that geographically it wasn’t so complicated to do this work. It was the best kind of homecoming one could have, what with The Stendhal Syndrome and Democracy waiting there for me.”
He may be based in New York, but for the first half of 2008, the road is his home.
“I’m so happy to see straight plays on the road. I think you’re going to see more in large part because of the success of this production, which I’m really proud of. If you choose the right shows, you’re going to see more plays touring out of NY.
“I love going around the country, playing the different cities, and different audiences. It’s a wonderful experience. There’s something really magic about the touring experience. As long as it’s a good production, good cities, first class, it’s a fantastic experience. I hope that more actors decide they want to do it.”