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"A Salute to Hollywood"
Where: Center for the Performing Arts, Hull Road at SW 34th Street, on the UF campus
When: At 8 p.m. Sunday
Auctions/cash bar: At 6 p.m.
Tickets: $50 (includes after-show reception), $25, $15, at ticketmaster outlets.
It was just a year ago - on Sept. 21, 1995 - that America first met Malcolm Gets, the boyish, piano-playing dynamo who'd begun his career at the Gainesville Community Playhouse when Jimmy Carter was still in the White House.
Gainesville's loss was the TV world's gain, because "Caroline in the City," which premiered on NBC that night, became an instant hit, thanks in no small part to Gets and his sour-mash portrayal of Richard Karinsky, frustrated painter, unrequited lover and embittered observer of life. Gets' melancholy Richard has proved just the comic foil for Lea Thompson's giddy Caroline, and a romance between the two characters seems inevitable as the situation comedy begins its second season this month.
But Malcolm Gets is hardly the brooding artist, and - biting sense of humor notwithstanding - Richard Karinsky is as far from the real Malcolm as Madonna is from the real Eva Peron.
Well, you get the idea.
Gets, 32, will show his true colors Sunday night at the Center for the Performing Arts. The 8 p.m. concert, "A Salute to Hollywood," is a fund-raiser for the Gainesville Symphony Orchestra. It's an all-pops affair featuring music by famous film composers, including John Williams and Bill Conti.
Halfway through the orchestra concert, Gainesville's own Must-See TV star will appear onstage and sing one of his favorites - "Soliloquy," from Rodger's and Hammerstein's "Carousel." It'll be his first time on a Gainesville stage in a decade.
Gets has always been musical, from his earlier days as a pianist for the GCP and Gainesville Suzu Orchestra to his triumphs with the Hippodrome State Theatre (including "Amadeus" and "The Little Shop of Horrors") and the University of Florida Department of Theatre. Gets left Gainesville at the tender age of 24, and within five or so years was appearing on Broadway (in "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "The Moliere Comedies").
His biggest pre-"Caroline" plum came in 1994 when his portrayal of Franklin in Stephen Sondheim's "Merrily We Roll Along" won the Obie Award for Best Actor in a Musical.
As an actor, Gets told The Sun last year, he finds Richard a joy to play. "Can you imagine the relief for me?" he said. "Because most of the frustration I felt in the last couple of years was that onstage people still want me to be like the romantic falling in love for the first time in his life."
The funny thing is, Richard - and "Caroline in the City" - have evolved so much, Gets might be playing that role again before long.
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