If Vancouver gave me some confidence in myself as a performer, Portland, Oregon confirmed and validated my abilities beyond my wildest imaginings! At the time of course I had no idea what I was heading into in the Spring of 1972, but remembering it now, 45 years later in preparation for these writings, I’m still overwhelmed and amazed by the breadth and scope of what I learned, achieved and passed on during my nine years there.

The Hoyt Hotel was pretty massive. It took up an entire city block opposite the train station. The area was somewhat sketchy, but the Hoyt was an tiny oasis, a classy hotel that had a broad reputation for its theatrical, quirky décor. It was a Mecca for the late night “demimonde” with a great restaurant open 24-hours a day and where, as it turned out, most of the city’s performers came to eat and drink after their shows. That was to prove invaluable in the time ahead.

Part of my contract arrangement included a room on the hotel’s top floor. I settled in quickly and we were off to the races! Rehearsals with the 16-person cast in 500-seat “The Roaring Twenties” Show Room were fast and furious. Jack Card liked it that way. The raised stage, which was huge and acted as a dance floor for the audience when it was in the house level position, accommodated us all nicely. This was a big production and called “What A Night” and was described by one of the reviewers as “the type of entertainment that’s disappearing from just about every place in the country except Las Vegas and Portland”. We were compared to “the big time” and lauded as “Class A show folk”! The show was great! It truly was. We played twice a night and three times on Saturday to packed houses and were, literally, the toast of the town. We toddled along for five months and then disaster struck.

Harvey Dick, the fatherly and flamboyant owner who watched over us like his own kids, had become embroiled in a lawsuit and began to close down the hotel, bit by bit.  Of course, the first thing to go was the showroom. My contract was for another two months and I had no place to work. Fortunately, Harvey had taken a liking to me and decided that I should do a feature act in the hotel Lounge. It was called “The Barbary Coast”, an incredible elongated space, one wall of which was taken up with an immense 40-foot long bar, and the other lined with functioning coin operated player pianos!! I sang nightly sets with a trio. All my friends from the show had gone on to other things and I was all by myself, bravely warbling for sparser and sparser crowds as the hotel wound down. But at least I had a job.

Very early one morning, there was a knock at my door. One of the guys from the trio, who was also staying in the hotel, was standing there in his dressing gown and babbling that we had to get out because they were closing down the hotel … now! RIGHT NOW! There are times when your mind simply won’t accept a huge piece of information and you find yourself unable to process words or thoughts. This was one of those moments. What do I do … NOW?

Over the months of eating in the restaurant, I had met and become friends with a LOT of Portland’s performers who, over a meal, were always on my case to audition for shows. A few calls later and I had found a place to crash until I could figure out something more permanent. I arranged some auditions, stuffed a suitcase with my sparse wardrobe and blindly stepped into a nine-year journey that would firmly establish me as a force to be reckoned with in the Great Pacific Northwest of the good old US of A!

The guiding light of Portland Civic Theatre (or “Theater” as the Yankees spell it) was Isabella Chappell. I don’t use the word “doyenne” very often, but that’s what she was, a dynamo with boundless energy, generosity and wisdom. She had already been running the theatre for a number of years when I arrived in her world, unannounced and without fanfare, and, as it happened, she took a shine to me and I became, for want of a better phrase and the chagrin of some other male performers in town, her “golden boy”.  I landed ‘Lucky’ in “Dames At Sea” in the late Fall of 1972, quickly followed by ‘C.C. Baxter’ in “Promises, Promises” and then the Inaugural season (1973) of “SRO at PCT”, a Summer Repertory company of 20 performers under the direction of Bill Dobson, Gene Davis Buck and Glenn Gauer. How I came to be so fortunate is beyond me, but I thought I had died and gone to heaven! In the period of a year, I had played more leading men than perhaps I deserved (adding ‘Bobby’ in “Boy Friend” and ‘Hero’ in “Forum” with SRO) and that was only the beginning. The intensity of this period is now only a visceral memory but I know that without those initial all-encompassing experiences I wouldn’t have had the grounding for the time that lay before me. The SRO Company experiences prepared me for the Company days at the Manitoba Theatre Centre years later, when trust and loyalty were the foundation of producing excellence and quality on stage. I am still friends with many of those folks from 45 years ago (thank goodness for Facebook) and we are connected through those halcyon days.

Then came “Cabaret”. I don’t want this post to turn into a “then-I-did” litany but I had to stop here for a moment. It hadn’t been all that long since Joel Grey had taken Broadway with his archetypal portrayal of the ‘MC’ in that Kander and Ebb masterpiece. Our production was being directed by a man named Jim Erickson, a high school drama teacher who had a huge reputation in Portland for incredibly extravagant visual productions without much attention being paid to the substance of a piece. But there was no escaping the “substance” of “Cabaret” and despite some set-to episodes between Jim and I, we managed to get this beautiful bugger on stage and it ended up being one of my most satisfying (and terrifying) theatrical experiences.

Opening night was fraught with the complicated and primitive stage machinery moving sets back and forth, and the visual effects seemed to have a life of their own despite having been practiced and practiced in the on-stage rehearsals before opening. The last image the audience was to be left with was of a swastika painted on a huge drop spanning the entire width of the stage instantly unfurling behind me as I whispered the final “Goodnight”. I took my final pose on a raised platform just inches in front of where the drop was to fall. I said the word. There as a moment of silence. I heard the drop start to come down and felt the “whoosh” of the steel batten at the bottom of the drop as it “kissed” the back of my head and smashed into the platform at the very end of the heel of my shoe. At the same time there was a snap blackout (the lights, not me), a momentary hush and the audience erupted in applause. The effect had worked spectacularly but I could see people rushing into the wings because no one could tell if I’d been hit. Just like in the movies, I could see our Producer, Isabella, shoving her way through the crowd of stage hands and performers yelling “Is he alright, is he alright!!??”  Needless to say, I was repositioned on the platform and the drop was “lowered quickly” in subsequent performances. Heady stuff!

Then followed in quick and constant succession (and I promised I wouldn’t do this but … meh) my directing forays with “Feiffer’s People”, “The Unexpected Guest”, “Jacques Brel” and the first of two productions of “Godspell”, and on stage again as ‘Finch’ (above) in “How To Succeed” and ‘Bobby’ in “Company” (a role that still ranks as one of my all-time favorites!) and a LOT of others.

It was about this time that I started “teaching”. Presumptuous? Perhaps. But it actually wasn’t my call. Over the years leading up to the question Isabella asked me one afternoon (“Have you ever thought about giving some classes?”) my focus had always been on learning the lines, developing the character and keeping my head above water in the sea of information and confusion that comprised rehearsals and performances. I guess the assimilation of “technique” was subliminal and I was constantly discovering what, for me, worked or didn’t in terms of preparation and presentation. The objective eye had been honed in a very subjective environment and trying to balance the two usually resulted in something that was considered and comfortable. I had imposed on myself an approach based in a lot of thinking about what I was actually doing, making it as personal as possible (not getting too “Uta Hagan-ish” about it – a method that never worked for me, I discovered) but always aware that communicating with my fellow actors and the people sitting in the dark was the most important part of my job. I tentatively told Isabella that I was perhaps interested and the word went out that I was to teach an acting class for adults.

At that time, the Portland Civic Theatre School had been neglected over the years to the point that there was only a single dance class and a Saturday morning class for kids, total enrollment of about 20 people. By the time I left eight years later, the School, which, eventually, I was put in charge of, had grown to 40 yearly classes and an annual enrollment of almost 1,000 students, young and old. But that first day of my first class was the first time I’d ever stepped in front of a group of people (15 in this case) to tell them what I had learned and was still learning.

The night before the class, there had been a big storm and the leaky roof of the building had produced large puddles of water on the floor of the small studio I’d been assigned. I arrived early and there was the elegant Isabella, on her hands and knees, with sopping towels trying to clean up the water. It’s an image that has stayed with me and summed up this incredible woman’s devotion to the cause. The class was attentive as I described what I thought we should deal with over the weeks to come and everything just mushroomed from there. Classes in Musical Theatre (natch!) were added, in various Acting approaches, in Tap and Ballet and Jazz, Master Classes for Advanced Adults as well as for the kids who were tugging at the bit to get on stage (and there were a LOT of them). We started adding productions for the youngsters to perform in and that grew into a full-fledged season of “Junior Civic Theatre”. The teenagers who rose to the top of the heap in those Master Classes are still in the biz today and scattered all over the place and I’m still in touch with them! THAT amazes me. But what amazed me even more was the fundamental personal satisfaction I found in teaching. To see someone come to an understanding, grasp a particular element of performance and run with it because of something I’d said or a direction in which I’d urged them is incredibly fulfilling. I guess every teacher feels this way, but it was something I didn’t know I could do. I will always be grateful for Isabella’s question all those years ago.

So, the combination of performing and teaching filled my days and nights to overflowing. The totality of theatre life fed my soul and was really self-perpetuating. But just when you think you can’t add another thing to the breathless mix you’re already experiencing, another opportunity presents itself and you can’t resist. That opportunity came in the form of “KBPS Radio Theatre”. I can gloss over the advent of this project, but suffice to say that it was the result of another casual conversation with another dynamic Portland “doyenne”.  This time it was Dr. Patricia Swenson, an Educational Communications Director on the Board of National Public Radio (NPR) and a rabid advocate for educational radio. Aside from my voicing any number of characters in educational programs for very young kids, we evolved a program of radio dramas broadcast on Sunday evenings and at various times during the week. They were half-hour adaptations of any script I could find (some of the longer ones done as mini-series over a few weeks) and employed local actors who got a quick education (as did I) about acting on the radio – a technique that had been long lost when that art form (and it WAS an art form) began to quickly fade with the advent of television. For three years we filled the air waves with comedy, drama, history and aural travelogues and even won national awards for which I got to travel to Washington and the National Press Club to receive.

And I stop here for a moment (there’s still more to come about Portland) to offer a word of advice, especially to my younger reader. When you’re in the middle of experiencing something, do something to remember it! The hard thing about that is that you usually don’t KNOW you’re experiencing something special. In the moment, it probably just seems to be the way life is going and you’re involvement is nothing to note. But it IS something to note! With the help of those Journals and scrapbooks I kept over the years, I can now conjure up the past with the flip of a page and my history becomes a lesson to myself in the present. Make an effort to remember! Perhaps write it down or speak into a recording device, just a note or two to file away about why and how something is happening to you. It’s your history. The value in those memories will present itself when you least expect it.

(UP Next: The Symphony and Decisions)