Robert Moe, Pioneer In Theater, Dies At 56
Robert Moe, a Lake City community theater pioneer, political activist and drama and speech professor, died Thursday in New York City.
He was 56.
A Lane, Idaho, native, Moe traveled to Coeur d’Alene after earning a master’s degree at the University of Idaho. The theater buff hooked up with a fledgling group of actors.
He began directing and performing in sparsely attended shows until, in 1968, he founded the Carrousel Players, a musical repertory theater here. Theater students and professional actors from across the Northwest were drawn here to perform three or four shows a summer.
“He’ll be remembered for taking theater from a zero-budget, wing-and-a-prayer thing to semi-professional,” said Mike Ward, an architect who moved here in the early 1970s to do scenery and lighting for Moe.
A “people-pleaser” and funnyman, Moe was by then managing Coeur d’Alene Community Theater and became a natural producer, Ward said.
“He chose the shows, hired the staff and cast, found a place to rehearse, sold advertising and would go to all the chamber meetings so people knew what was happening,” Ward said.
Attorney Bob Brown, who served 10 years on the theater board, said Moe kept all of the theater supplies in a trailer he towed behind his car - a simpler task then, because productions and casts were tiny.
“In fact, he met his wife when they both were in (the play) ‘Luv,”’ Brown said.
The couple also performed in “Stop the World I Want to Get Off.”
Their first daughter, Lisa, was a baby at the time and was onstage in the arms of actors. The couple later had two more daughters, Laurie and Leslie.
Moe left Coeur d’Alene in the 1970s to teach high school in California, but returned every summer to run the theater. He came back full time in 1978 to teach drama at North Idaho College.
He left the college in the mid-1980s and went to New York and California, hoping to break into a writing and directing career.
“He was a perfectionist,” Brown said. “Everything he did had to be flawless. And it showed.”
Carrousel Players from throughout the country are expected to attend a memorial gathering for Moe this weekend. A public memorial service is set for 2 p.m. Friday at Yates Funeral Home.
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