#24: Theater Participation, vol. 2, Post-College

Although I was involved in music in college I was not involved in theater. I don’t recall theater even being mentioned, let alone going. But once I had graduated with a degree in electrical engineering I decided it was time to get serious about music.

I moved back in with my parents and practiced both guitar (which I had taken up the previous summer) and oboe two hours a day all summer. I kept that up even after fall came and I got a full-time job as an electrical engineer. I did all that until spring to save enough money to go to Europe to meet my girlfriend who was studying in France. We broke up as soon as I arrived, of course. That’s how these things go.

After six months traveling around Europe and eight more living with friends in Corvallis, my money ran out and I had to take a job with that same engineering firm I’d been working for, the one I had left declaring, “I’m never coming back!” That’s how these things go.

Being back in Portland, I was able to study oboe with the principal oboist of the Oregon Symphony, and by the following year I had my first professional—well, fairly professional—gig playing in the orchestra for the Singing Christmas Tree. The Singing Christmas Tree consisted of a large choir standing on risers that formed an enormous Christmas tree with other things happening on stage that I couldn’t see from the orchestra pit. Theater of a sort, I think.

The following year I started playing in the Portland Opera orchestra. And really, for all intents and purposes, opera is musical theater, only without tap dancing.

As for actual musical theater, I didn’t play much. Playing the entire run of a show didn’t interest me because of the time required. But a friend of mine had the gig playing oboe in the Civic Theatre orchestra and occasionally he would have a conflict and would hire me to sub for him for a couple of nights. I would sightread the shows with no rehearsal, having only looked over the music enough to check for really tricky parts. It was a great adrenalin rush. If memory serves, I played two productions of Peter Pan (this was their yearly holiday fund-raiser) plus Sweeny Todd and Evita. Evita was my favorite with the constantly changing time signatures that Andrew Lloyd Weber loves throwing in.

But I quit oboe in 1990 as I wasn’t getting enough work to make the amount of practice required worth it. Just for kicks I took a renaissance recorder class and met a guy there who occasionally asked me to play in the small combos he would cobble together for various functions. We would sightread through music that he had collected and it was fun.

Then one day he asked if I’d like to play a rehearsal of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I said sure and showed up. A local composer had been commissioned to write incidental music just for this show, and I enjoyed reading through it. But at the end of the rehearsal, the producer stood up and reminded everyone of the performance schedule. I went back my friend and said, “Hey, you only asked me to come to today’s rehearsal, but they say there are two performances every weekend in August, plus an extra one on Labor Day!” He said, “You will do it, won’t you?” I thought about it for a moment, realized I didn’t have anything going on in August, and said, “Sure.”

And it turned out to be fun, hanging out, playing for Shakespeare in the Parks. Enough fun, in fact, that the next year I not only played their production of Romeo and Juliet but I talked them into having me write the incidental music as well, and did the same the following year for The Comedy of Errors.

So this was my first true foray into theater. But it was not to be my last!

Phil