Location: ///solved.barn.anyone
35°16.89438’S, 149°7.3425’E

Theatre 3 is home to one of Australia’s oldest theatre companies, Canberra REP.
It is a simple brick building with a seating capacity of less than 200 and it usually stages around six productions a year.

Back in another life I played the trumpet, and it so happened that I participated in a number of musicals in this theatre (let’s see….Godspell, Hair, Josephs Technicolor Dreamcoat) as well as ‘Look Back in Anger’ by John Osborn. This was definitely not a musical but the main character, Jimmy, played the trumpet.

Jimmy was a troubled man, and a mediocre musician so I was a perfect choice for his soundtrack. 

I was secreted in the female change room (apparently this was the best location acoustically) and they had rigged up a small speaker system so the lighting manager could cue me when to start and stop playing as Jimmy went off-stage to practice in his room. 

I don’t remember much about the play except for side-eying the activity in the female change room…. and at one point Jimmy calling another character “sycophantic, phlegmatic and pusillanimous” a pretty impressive insult stream that I immediately filed away in my long term memory for retrieval at appropriate times.

I loved playing in old theatres like this. there is this certain wonderful woody, creative, mysterious, exciting smell (if you don’t go you don’t know), and playing in the orchestra pit was always entertaining both during live performance and the inevitable thespian dramas of rehearsals.